PiBox

I built the toolchain for RPi 2/3 but made it 32-bit. I need to change it to 64-bit and rebuild the kernel (which I'd already built as 32-bit).

Found a walkthrough for building with Crosstool-NG for 64bit.

Looks like my config file might not be appropriate for aarch64. I need to run

ct-ng aarch64-rpi3-linux-gnu

and then compare that .config with my saved config (re: make xcc-meld, which doesn't exist yet).

Use of compiler options need to be removed with aarch64 builds, and an additional --aarch64 passed to the buildme script. However, I have a custom copy called buildme.pibox which needs merging with the upstream because it's missing the --aarch64 option.

64bit build fails on nodejs for reasons I don't understand. Node.js is only used with Ironman. I could have 64bit and 32bit builds for RPI3 as a workaround.

However, I'd like to dump node.js. Javascriopt is fine - it's client side. But I don't need node.js on the server side. I should drop all node.js dependencies in ironman so I can use the 64bit builds on RPi 2 and 3.

Buildroot build completes after removing nodejs, but generation of ext4 file system fails, probably because the rootfs has gotten huge (see RM #1003). The ext4 file system isn't really needed anyway - there is already a tarball created by buildroot that can be used to create a non-squashfs install. So I'll drop the ext4 image (see RM #1004).

Buildroot now gets passed file system image creation but fails here.

>>>   Executing post-image script board/raspberrypi3-64/post-image.sh
INFO: cmd: "mkdir -p "/home/mjhammel/src/ximba/raspberrypi/bld/buildroot-2023.02.2/output/build/genimage.tmp"" (stderr):
INFO: cmd: "rm -rf "/home/mjhammel/src/ximba/raspberrypi/bld/buildroot-2023.02.2/output/build/genimage.tmp"/*" (stderr):
INFO: cmd: "mkdir -p "/home/mjhammel/src/ximba/raspberrypi/bld/buildroot-2023.02.2/output/build/genimage.tmp"" (stderr):
INFO: cmd: "cp -a "/tmp/tmp.HnXquGN49Z" "/home/mjhammel/src/ximba/raspberrypi/bld/buildroot-2023.02.2/output/build/genimage.tmp/root"" (stderr):
ERROR: file(bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb): stat(/home/mjhammel/src/ximba/raspberrypi/bld/buildroot-2023.02.2/output/images/bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb) failed: No such file or directory
ERROR: vfat(boot.vfat): could not setup bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb

Now I've hit an impasse - the GLES (re: Userland) build doesn't officially support 64bit. It does build, but it doesn't build all libraries. One that's missing is the openmax library (all the mmal libraries, actually) required by omxplayer. So that's a show stopper - I can't build for 64bit because I require omxplayer. I don't want to switch to vlc because omxplayer fits my use cases better.

So it's back to a 32bit build.

Another twist: crosstool-ng has defconfigs for all rpi platforms, but now rpi2 and rpi3 are different. I could build for rpi2 and run on both (that worked up till now) but that may not optimize for rpi3.

So now I need rpi, rpi2 and rpi3 builds. Well, if that's what it takes to optimize, so be it.

I'll start with rpi2 and then add rpi3, then go back and update rpi1.

After cleaning out the aarch64 build options I rebuilt the toolchain and tried to rebuild the kernel. It failed looking for gmp.h. As it happens, this file is required on the build host from the libgmp-dev package. After installing libgmp-dev, I tried again and found I was missing mpc.h, which is in libmpc-dev. So I have added these two libraries to the docker build.

Kernel is now building.

Retesting the build I found that the kernel didn't boot. Replacing my kernel with the kernel7.img found in the firmware collection allowed the kernel to boot, but that's all. So my build of the kernel with the new gcc didn't work. So, first step is to rebuild the kernel with the old gcc to make sure that works.

Then rebuild the toolchain with the latest Crosstool-NG but the same config (as much as possible) and rebuild the kernel. Then retest to see if that boots. It's best to keep the SD card I've already made and just replace the bits as I go, at least until I have the kernel booting.

Disregard that comment. I was using the wrong sandbox for the test.

Retesting with full component update build does allow the kernel to start to boot but then it crashes. I'll try putting the old firmware on the SD card and see if that helps, but I kind of doubt it.

Tested with old firmware - no change.

Testing with old kernel but new xcc.

Note: I had problems proving the SD cards were okay because somehow the existing build from the 2.0 release for rpi2 was corrupted. I rebuilt that release and retested to make sure both the SD card and RPi3 B+ were working - they are. So now I'm rebuilding just xcc and then will use that to rebuild the kernel. I only need it to boot cleanly, even if busybox doesn't work with it yet.