Embedded Linux

system development
Training lab book

Sysdev – Tiny embedded system with BusyBox

Objective: making a tiny yet full featured embedded system.

After this lab, you will

be able to configure and build a Linux kernel that boots on a
directory on your workstation, shared through the network by
NFS.
be able to create and configure a minimalistic root filesystem
from scratch (ex nihilo, out of nothing, entirely hand made...) for
the Calao board
understand how small and simple an embedded Linux system can
be.
be able to install BusyBox on this filesystem.
be able to create a simple startup script based on /sbin/init.
be able to set up a simple web interface for the target.
have an idea of how much RAM a Linux kernel smaller than 1 MB
needs.

Lab implementation
While (s)he develops a root filesystem for a device, a developer
needs to make frequent changes to the filesystem contents, like
modifying scripts or adding newly compiled programs.
It isn't practical at all to reflash the root filesystem on the target
every time a change is made. Fortunately, it is possible to set up
networking between the development workstation and the target.
Then, workstation files can be accessed by the target through the
network, using NFS.
Unless you test a boot sequence, you no longer need to reboot the
target to test the impact of script or application updates.

Development PC Target (Calao)
nfsroot/root directory /root directory

NFS export

Network

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 Embedded Linux
System development
Training lab book

Setup
Go to the /home/<user>/felabs/sysdev/tinysystem/ directory.
Get the sources from the latest 2.6.29.x release and place them in
the current directory.

Kernel configuration
Set the ARCH and CROSS_COMPILE kernel Makefile variables for cross-
compiling to the arm instruction set.
Configure the 2.6.29 kernel sources with the configuration file
supplied in the data/ subdirectory.
Other TCP/IP networking configuration
Add the configuration options that enable booting on a root settings are already enabled in the
filesystem sitting on an NFS remote directory. provided configuration file.

Compile your kernel and generate the uImage kernel image suitable
for U-Boot.

Root filesystem with Busybox

Create an nfsroot/ directory that will contain the root filesystem for
the target.
Download the latest BusyBox 1.13.x release and configure it with the
Compiling Busybox statically in the
configuration file provided in the data/ directory. first place makes it easy to set up the
system, because there are no
At least, make sure you build BusyBox statically! dependencies on libraries. Later on, we
Build BusyBox using the toolchain that you used to build the kernel. will set up shared libraries and
recompile Busybox.
Install BusyBox in the root filesystem by running make install.

Setting up the NFS server

Install the NFS server by installing the nfs­kernel­server package
if you don't have it yet. Once installed, edit the /etc/exports file as
root to add the following line, assuming that the IP address of your
board will be 192.168.0.100 (the path and the options must be on
the same line!)
/home/<user>/felabs/sysdev/tinysystem/nfsroot 
192.168.0.100(rw,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
Then, restart the NFS server:
sudo /etc/init.d/nfs­kernel­server restart

Booting the system

First, boot the board to the U-Boot prompt. Put the uImage file of
your compiled kernel in the directory exported by TFTP. Download
and flash your kernel to the board, as done in the previous lab.
Before booting the kernel, we need to tell it that the root filesystem
should be mounted over NFS, by setting some kernel parameters.
First, in Minicom, type [Ctrl] [a] [w] to enable line wrapping. This
will allow you to type long lines like the one that follows.
Use the following U-Boot command to do so (in just 1 line):
setenv bootargs root=/dev/nfs ip=192.168.0.100 nfsroot=192.168.0.1:/home/
<user>/felabs/sysdev/tinysystem/nfsroot

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 Embedded Linux
system development
Training lab book

Of course, you need to adapt the IP addresses to your exact network

setup. Save the environment variables (with saveenv).
Try to boot your new system on the board. If everything goes right,
the kernel should confirm that it managed to mount the NFS root
filesystem. Then, you should get the following error:
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
What happens is that your root filesystem is missing a /dev/console 
device file in it. Create it with the mknod command (using the same
major and minor number as in your GNU/Linux workstation). Try
You can understand our approach to
again.
build filesystems from scratch. We're
BusyBox init will complain about more missing device files. Add waiting for programs to complain
before adding device or configuration
these files too in a similar way, and try again and again. files. This is a way of making sure that
every file in the filesystem is used.
At the end, you will access a console and will be able to issue
commands through the default shell.

Virtual filesystems
From the Linux command line in the target, create the proc, sys and
etc directories in your root filesystem.
Now mount the proc virtual filesystem.
Now that /proc is available, note that you can halt your target in a
clean way with the halt command.

System configuration and startup

docs/BusyBox.txtsyntaxonly exists if
Open the docs/BusyBox.txt file in BusyBox sources, and look for
you ran the make command. It won't
details about the kind of /etc/inittab file that BusyBox init exist if you directly run make install.
supports.
Actually, you will probably have
Create a /etc/inittab file and a /etc/init.d/rcS startup script several instructive surprises when
trying to implement this. Don't hesitate
defined in /etc/inittab. In this startup script, mount the /proc and to share your questions with your
/sys filesystems. instructor!

Any issue after doing this?

Switching to shared libraries

Take the hello.c program supplied in the data directory. Cross-
compile it for ARM, dynamically-linked with the libraries, and run it
on the target.
You will first encounter a not found error caused by the absence of
the ld­uClibc.so.0 executable, which is the dynamic linker
required to execute any program compiled with shared libraries.
Using the find command (see examples in your command memento
sheet), look for this file in the toolchain install directory, and copy it
to the lib/ directory on the target.
Then, running the executable again and see that the loader executes
and finds out which shared libraries are missing. Similarly, find
these libraries in the toolchain and copy them to lib/ on the target.
Once the small test program works, recompile Busybox without the
static compilation option, so that Busybox takes advantages of the
shared libraries that are now present on the target.

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 Embedded Linux
System development
Training lab book

Implement a web interface for your device

Replicate data/www/ to the /www directory in your target root
filesystem.
Now, run the BusyBox http server from the command line:
/usr/sbin/httpd ­h /www/ &
If you use a proxy, configure your host browser so that it doesn't go
through the proxy to connect to the target IP address, or simply
disable proxy usage. Now, test that your web interface works well
by opening http://192.168.0.100:80 on the host.
See how the dynamic pages are implemented. Very simple, isn't it?

How much RAM does your system need?

Check the /proc/meminfo file and see how much RAM is used by
your system.
You can try to boot your system with less memory, and see whether
it still works properly or not. For example, to test whether 6 MB are
enough, boot the kernel with the mem=6M parameter. Linux will then
use just 6 MB of RAM, and ignore the rest.

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