Nerves System Builder

This project contains scripts for building and maintaining Nerves systems. It's not the only way to build Nerves systems. The recommended way is to build them using mix similar to how you'd build other Elixir projects. If you are working with Buildroot a lot or maintain several Nerves systems, the recommended way is slow. This way can be faster.

IMPORTANT: We had a lot of ad hoc shell scripts to do this that were hardcoded to paths on the Nerves Core team's development computers. The idea with this project is to do the same thing in a way that we have a chance of supporting. Not everything is here yet.

Initial setup

This only works on Linux on x86_64 and aarch64. This works on M1 Macs with a Linux VM.

Make sure that you're system has >128GB of free disk space. Depending on what's in the Nerves system, the amount of disk space to build it could be very large.

Assuming that you're running Debian, install the following:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git build-essential bc cmake cvs wget curl mercurial python3 python3-aiohttp python3-flake8 python3-ijson python3-nose2 python3-pexpect python3-pip python3-requests rsync subversion unzip gawk jq squashfs-tools libssl-dev automake autoconf libncurses5-dev

Next, install Erlang and Elixir.

Finally, install the Elixir and Nerves archives:

mix archive.install hex nerves_bootstrap
mix local.rebar

Configuration

The configuration is kept in config/config.exs. To get started, copy config/starter-config.exs to config/config.exs:

cp config/starter-config.exs config/config.exs

Take a look at the config.exs and delete or add systems as needed. If you're just starting, delete all but one or two so that building doesn't take forever.

Now that you have a configuration, call the ns.clone mix task to download the systems to the src directory.

mix ns.clone

There's nothing magical about the ns.clone task, you could run git clone manually if you want. The directory structure should look like this:

src/
    nerves_system_br
    nerves_system_rpi0
    nerves_system_bbb
    ...

If you want to start over, it's fine to run rm -fr src.

Building

Building is a two step process:

Turn the nerves_defconfig into a .config file in the output directory (o/<system short name>)
Run make in o/<system short name>

If you're used to Buildroot, you may have a feel for when you can do incremental builds and when you can't. When in doubt, start over by deleting the output directory.

The ns.build mix task will run both steps.

mix ns.build

Hints

If ns.build fails, go to the failing output directory and run make.
Run make source to download everything. Then run make and come back later.
Downloads are stored in ~/.nerves/dl
After running make menuconfig, run make savedefconfig. The updates will be in src/nerves_system_xyz and you can commit them.

Using the system

After the system builds successfully, open up another terminal window. Build your Nerves project in this one. There are special environment variables that will tell the Nerves build system to use your custom-built system rather than the one referenced in the mix.exs.

To load these variables in your environment, first find the nerves.env.sh script in the output directory that corresponds to your Nerves project's target. Then run it in the terminal for your Nerves project. For example if your Nerves target is Raspberry Pi Zero, the script path may look like this:

. ~/path/to/nerves_systems/o/rpi0/nerves-env.sh

Modify the path accordingly.

Don't forget to set the MIX_TARGET like normal:

export MIX_TARGET=rpi0

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at [http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0](http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.