标签：#buildroot

Buildroot builds a cross-compiler, a Linux kernel and a complete root filesystem from source, driven by one Kconfig-style configuration file. Starting from the qemu_arm_vexpress_defconfig that ships with Buildroot 2026.05.1, two commands produce a bootable ARM system you can run under QEMU. The images you ship are the ones in output/images/ ; output/target/ looks like a root filesystem but must never be copied to a device. This post starts a new hands-on series on Buildroot for embedded Linux. By the end of this part you will have built a working Buildroot root filesystem for an ARM target, booted it under QEMU, and understood which generated directories are safe to ship. Later parts add your own packages, a BR2_EXTERNAL tree, kernel and bootloader integration, and reproducible image output. If the choice between build systems is still open, our earlier Yocto vs Buildroot comparison covers it; this series assumes the decision is made. What you need A Linux host, several gigabytes of free disk space, and a network connection. No development board is needed for this part; QEMU stands in for the hardware. On a Debian or Ubuntu host, this covers the mandatory packages the manual lists, plus the ncurses development files that menuconfig needs: raghu@techveda.org:~$ sudo apt install build-essential diffutils patch gzip bzip2 perl tar cpio unzip rsync file bc findutils gawk wget libncurses-dev One rule from the manual is worth stating plainly: build everything as a normal user. Buildroot never needs root, and running it as root exposes your host to any package that misbehaves during installation. The command above is the only one in this post that uses sudo . Getting Buildroot and choosing a target Download and unpack the current stable release — 2026.05.1 at the time of writing — from buildroot.org/downloads , and work from that directory. Buildroot ships ready-made configurations for many boards and emulated machines, one file each in configs/ , and make list-defconfigs