Debian for toys

A (personal) set of scripts to build bootable Debian images for various architectures and development boards (or "toys", that's how we call them).

Supported toys

• RISC-V

  • QEMU (riscv64)
  • SiFive HiFive Unleashed
  • StarFive VisionFive 2

• AArch64

  • QEMU (aarch64)
  • ODROID-N2+

• ARM (arm-linux-gnueabihf)

  • QEMU (arm)

• POWER

  • QEMU (ppc64le)

More toys will be added as I acquire them and get them up and running (or migrate older scripts to this repository).

!!! BIG FAT WARNING !!!

Scripts below do use sudo quite a lot. IF THERE"S A BUG, IT MAY WIPE OUT YOUR SYSTEM. DO NOT RUN THESE SCRIPTS WITHOUT READING THEM CAREFULLY FIRST.

They're provided for convenience. Use at your own risk.

Setting up host environment

Disclaimer: following recipe is (semi-regularly) tested on Debian Testing (Trixie at the time of writing). Debian 12 (Bookworm) is known to work too. If you have Debian 11 (Bullseye) or some other Debian-based distro, e.g, Ubuntu, this recipe may or may not work!

1. Install required tools (QEMU, mmdebstrap and so on):

   sudo apt-get install mmdebstrap qemu-user-static qemu-system-misc binfmt-support debian-ports-archive-keyring rsync device-tree-compiler genimage genext2fs dosfstools guestfish guestfs-tools
   

2. Install build tools for each architecture you want to build image for:

   crossbuild-essential-riscv64 crossbuild-essential-ppc64el
   

Building bootable images

For each architecture and "board" you may find following scripts:

• <arch>/<board>/mk-fs.sh <image> to build a root filesystem. <image> can be either:

  • an empty directory
  • raw filesystem image containing ext4 file system
  • raw or .qcow2 disk image containing a partition table and one exatly one ext4-formatted partition. Note, that when using .qcow2 images, filesystem creation process is really slow.

• <arch>/<board>/mk-os.sh to build a linux kernel suitable for the board

• <arch>/<board>/mk-ub.sh to build U-Boot bootloader suitable for the board

• <arch>/<board>/mk-im.sh to build a complete disk / SD-card image to use with the board. mk-im.sh calls above scripts as needed to build bootloader, kernel and filesystem and package all that into a single file.

Other Notes & Comments

...mainly so I won't need to fish for them every single time :-)

• Connecting to serial console over FTDI:

  sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
  

• Write SD card image to the SD card:

  pv images/sdcard.img | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=32M oflag=sync
  

• Create .tar.gz of root filesystem from disk image:

  guestfish -a sdcard.img \
      run \
    : mount /dev/sda4 / \
    : tar-out / rootfs.tgz compress:gzip numericowner:true xattrs:true acls:true
  

  Replace /dev/sda4 as needed.

• Extracting .tar.gz of root filesystem (see above) to (NFS) volume:

  tar --xattrs --acls -xf rootfs.tgz
  

  Note --xattrs and --acls options, they are important!

• Uploading root filesystem in build/root to remote (NFS) server:

  sudo true; sudo tar -C build/root --xattrs --acls -zc . | pv -s 1G | ssh <server> sudo tar -C <export_dir> --xattrs --acls -zx
  

• Sometimes it happened to me that /var/lib/dpkg/available disappeared. This prevents dpkg / apt from removing packages. Following command fixed this for me:

  sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update
  

License

This code is licensed under MIT license. See LICENSE.txt.