[Buildroot] BR 2012.rc1 :: wrong bootfiles?!

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Le Fri, 9 Mar 2012 14:21:09 +0000,
MERCADIER Johann <johann.mercadier@imerir.com> a ?crit :

>    I would like to mention a recurrent problem I have and which is
> the same since the 2011.11 version of BR.
>    When I successfully built a project I got uImage, MLO and
> u-boot.bin as part of the boot process. Any of these files make me
> able to boot the card. At the moment I use MLO and u-boot.bin couple
> from an ubuntu distro and I manually compile my own kernel image. In
> this way that's work. I've already try to use the uImage generated by
> BR with loader from the ubuntu distro and the card didn't start at
> all. What then could be so different? Does someone else has to face
> the same issue?

Hum. I am not sure you realize that uImage is the kernel image, and
this image highly depends on 1/ the kernel version and 2/ the kernel
configuration.

So yes, if you give a completely wrong kernel configuration to
Buildroot, or tell Buildroot to build a kernel version that does not
work on your hardware, then the kernel image generated by Buildroot
will not work.

You seem to think that Buildroot does a lot of black magic behind the
back. Basically, what Buildroot does with your kernel is:

 1/ Download the kernel sources tarball according to the version you
 have specified

 2/ Extract this tarball

 3/ Apply the kernel configuration you have provided

 4/ Build the kernel by running 'make' (i.e, the normal build process
 of the Linux kernel)

 5/ Copy the uImage to output/images/

That's it. So if the kernel generated by Buildroot does not work for
you, there is 99.9999999% chances that your kernel version and/or
configuration is wrong, and only 0.00000001% chances that Buildroot is
at fault.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
development, consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com