Version 2013.02 of the Buildroot embedded Linux build system has been released by its maintainer, Peter Korsgaard, see the release announcement. A tarball has been released, but most users will probably like the Git tag.
In this new version:
- The toolchain support has been updated: addition of GDB 7.5.1, switch to GCC 4.6.3 as the default compiler, usage of Crosstool-NG 1.17.0 for the Crosstool-NG toolchain backend, many updates to the external toolchains (updates of Linaro ARM and AArch64 toolchains, and to the MIPS Sourcery CodeBench toolchain).
- At the architecture level, added ARM Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A15, brought some Xtensa fixes, deprecated the support for OABI on ARM, added some missing PowerPC variants, and the ARM1136JF-S rev1 variant.
- Added default board configuration for Snowball, Calao USB-A9260, the ML705 (PowerPC440) emulated by Qemu and the ARM Exynos4210 platform emulated by Qemu.
- Addition of Eclipse integration. A Buildroot-specific plugin is provided, which allows Eclipse to automatically discover and use the Buildroot toolchains available on the current machine. See the project Wiki for more details.
- There are now configuration options to set the system root password, and the possibility of using post-image scripts (scripts that are executed after all filesystem images have been generated, for example to generate a final firmware image, or automatically uncompress a filesystem into a NFS directory).
- A number of packages were added: b43-firmware, b43-fwcutter, bustle, cache-calibrator, cegui06, celt051, classpath, curlftpfs, dvb-apps, dvbsnoop, elfutils, enlightenment, firmware-imx, flashbench, gd, gesftpserver, gst-fsl-plugins, httping, iftop, imx-lib, jamvm, jpeg-turbo, keyutils, libatasmart, libcofi, libebml, libevas-generic-loaders, libfslcodec, libfslparser, libfslvpuwrap, libgsasl, libiscsi, libmatroska, libmcrypt, libmhash, libqwt, libseccomp, libsha1, linenoise, mcrypt, media-ctl, ncdu, neard, neardal, nettle, perf, polkit, proxychains, python-bottle, python-pyparsing, rpi-firmware, rpi-userland, sg3_utils, slirp, snowball-hdmiservice, spice, spice-protocol, tcllib, tvheadend, udisks, usbredir, ux500-firmware, vde2, xcb-utils-keysyms, yavta, zd1211-firmware.
- A number of old X.org graphics drivers have been removed, as they are very unlikely to be used, especially in embedded contexts.
- And many, many package were upgraded or fixed.
With 849 commits, this three months cycle was almost as active as the previous one, which had 856 commits. The contributors having submitted more than 10 patches are:
247 Gustavo Zacarias 203 Thomas Petazzoni 127 Peter Korsgaard 61 Yann E. MORIN 39 Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium/Mind) 20 Samuel Martin 15 Simon Dawson 14 Maxime Ripard 12 Stefan Fröberg
It is also worth noting that during this cycle, the Buildroot community had a meeting in Brussels early February, for which we published a report some time ago.