Hi Colin, On 31.07.2017 17:00, Colin Williams wrote:
Hi, thanks for the response. I first tried using docker to build, but it appears to use the same kernel version that the host uses. Then the instructions suggest getting the kernel headers using uname -r. I'm going to assume it's using the Ubuntu kernel for the build?
(please note that my comments are based on my experience with various cross-compilation systems, not based on using this one) That shouldn't be the case. Some libraries/utilities even when cross-compiled, require that you first build host variants of those utilities. Hence I presume the requirement of having eg libssl-dev on your host, or the host's kernel headers. They wouldn't be directly used for the target builds, but they might be required to build some tools used for building the target filesystem.
At the moment I've been trying to build on Debian, since Docker didn't work out. But maybe an Ubuntu VM would work best, because it wouldn't share kernels. However I think there should be a way to cross compile. Also it doesn't seem to mention the kernel version, instead Ubuntu LTS.
The kernel version is most likely irrelevant here. The fact they mention Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is simply because that's where it's been tested. I don't expect anything special about it, but various linux distribution may ship different versions/variants of standard gnu utils and as a result even a trivial app like 'diff' in one linux variant may accept some non-standard commandline arguments that a 'diff' in a different linux release wouldn't and could make the build fail. In fact that's probably what may be happening here - just for a test I started a build following the readme instructions on my machine (ubuntu 16.04) and it failed with an error in wget, which looks like caused by some wrong arguments.
A little concerned regarding the kernel version. Am I right they are installing the Ubuntu kernel headers to use for the firmware target? If so isn't that strange because an LTS release has many kernel versions, and the instructions use uname?
No, the kernel for the target is in the release package: WECB-NCS-GPL/rtl819x/linux-2.6.30.
I think the main source of your problem (although potentially not the only one) is that you have mips-linux-gcc in your $PATH and this is something that this build system doesn't expect - and as a result it uses your Debian's mips-linux-gcc rather than the one from WECB-NCS-GPL/rtl819x/toolchain/
Marcin
