PiBox

The steps to implement this are as follows.

1. gzip rootfs.tar in buildroot config
2. Add rpi-userland build to buildroot config
3. Remove -ext3 build target
4. Copy <br>/output/images/rootfs.tar to <pkgdir> in -pkg
5. Change dd_root_partition to unpack_rootfs in mkinstall

The rootfs.squashfs and rootfs.tar will already have rpitools since buildroot is now handling them.

If this works then we can drop the gles component build. However, if the Buildroot build doesn't work then we'll have to keep the PiBox build and generate the squashfs after we copy in the rpi-userland stuff to the rootfs tarball.

Buildroot's version of GLES:
commit 14b90ff9d9f031391a299e6e006965d02bfd1bb1
Author: Dave Stevenson <dave.stevenson@raspberrypi.com>
Date: Wed Nov 24 16:51:04 2021 +0000

My Version:
commit f97b1af1b3e653f9da2c1a3643479bfd469e3b74 (HEAD)
Author: popcornmix <popcornmix@gmail.com>
Date: Thu May 28 14:34:53 2020 +0100

Tested on hardware. Seems to be okay - the tvservice app is there and the rest of the binaries are in the buildroot/output/target tree. However, I can't run manual tests on hardware because the keyboard doesn't work (see RM #951). The only thing I see that didn't get installed but that I used previously was the hello_pi source directory, which has Vera.ttf font. I'm not sure if I used that anywhere, but if any of the system apps do I can just copy that file from build/rpi-userland*/host_applications/linux/apps/hello_pi/hello_font/Vera.ttf in the postbuild.sh script.

This seems to work, in general. I also fixed the keyboard problem. So the check-ins will be combined later.

However, the change to using Buildroot's rpi-userland package changes the location of the libraries. They used to be in /opt/vc/lib. Now they are in /usr/lib. That requires changing omxplayer's build.

omxplayer doesn't build - it's missing some libraries, even after I update the custom Makefiles.

Honestly, I don't want to mess with this. The external build of rpi-userland and omxplayer works fine. Instead of making these big changes I'm going to leave them the way they were.

So that means we need to have the gles stuff added to the custom tree that gets copied to the build tree before we run postbuild.sh, which is run before squashfs. I think that already happens, but I need to check to be sure. It just requires that gles is built before buildroot, which is what was happening previously.

In any case, the Buildroot build will just generate a tarball (for non-overlay installs) and the squashfs (for overlay installs). We might even simply this by just generating the squashfs and then mounting it to copy over to the non-overlay file system.

To unpack a squashfs

  sudo unsquashfs -f -d <dest> <squashfs file>

So that means I don't need the tarball generated.

To mount the squashfs (if the unsquashfs copy doesn't work as desired)

  sudo mount -t squashfs -o loop rootfs.squashfs /mnt/disk