<style type="text/css"> TD { text-align: center; } TABLE { border-collapse: collapse; border: 1px solid black; } </style> <title> Fedora Bootstrap </title>

Fedora Bootstrap

These two scripts are designed to help you bootstrap Fedora to a new architecture. Generally, one Fedora release is built upon the previous release, but this cannot be done for a new platform - you must cross-compile enough packages to "bootstrap" the new platform. This can be a tricky endeavor, and these scripts try to do it for you.

There are a few convenience functions in the scripts that you may wish to edit and take advantage of. Search for the "sync" module that rsync's the rootfs to a running target as /hardfp for one example. Also, the first section of the stage1 script has some variables that define the target you're building for.

The stage1 script is run first, on any host. It expects a symbolic link in the current directory called "SRPMs" that points to a directory full of SRPMs. You may also have a link SRPMlocal that points to a directory with local SRPMs; any SRPM in the local directory will be used instead of a corresponding one in the SRPMs directory - this is most likely going to be a board-specific kernel, for example. Also, GIT will be used to fetch x-loader and u-boot sources.

Stage1 will take a long time to build, but will eventually produce a cross-development toolchain and a bootable rootfs. How you turn that rootfs tree into a bootable media depends on the board; this script targets SDcard-based OMAP boards, and creates both MLO and uboot in the /boot/ subdirectory in the rootfs, which you would need to copy to the FAT partition where the OMAP chip expects to find them. Note that no uInitrd is created, so any drivers you need should be compiled-in to the kernel.

Stage1 will also pre-populate your rootfs image with all the sources needed for stage2, so expect the rootfs to be large.

Note that it is possible to NFS-mount your just-built rootfs on a compatible platform, and chroot into it, providing you allow root permissions to that mount. However, this method is only useful for minor variations on an architecture - for example, bootstrapping a hard-float OS on a soft-float OS.

Stage2 is run on the new platform. Boot stage1, cd to /stage2, and run the stage2 script. It should take even longer and build even more packages. When done, you should have a platform on which you can run "rpmbuild" for the remainder of the packages you need.


As you use this script, please update the table below for which targets and releases are known to work.

Date Architecture Fedora Works?
2011-Jun-06 armv7hl 15 Yes


Packages are listed in alphabetical order, not build order.

Stage 1

<tt> bash binutils bzip2 cloog coreutils diffutils findutils gawk gcc glibc gmp grep gzip kernel libmpc libselinux make mpfr patch ppl sed tar u-boot unzip util-linux which x-loader xz zlib </tt>

Stage 2

<tt> cpio ncurses m4 flex bison texinfo gdb curl nspr pcre readline chkconfig sqlite gdbm gawk pth libtool db4 perl openssl gettext popt glib2 pkgconfig nss </tt>