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  1. Building OpenWrt for Gateworks Products
    1. OpenWrt BSP Branches
    2. Revision Log
    3. OpenWrt BSP Pre-Built Binaries
    4. Building Pre-requisites
    5. Downloaded Source Files
    6. Step by Step Instructions
      1. Step 1: Getting Source Code
      2. Step 2: Building
        1. Artifacts
      3. Step 3: Installing
    7. Building JTAG Binary File
    8. Customizing
    9. Updating to Latest Gateworks Source
    10. Troubleshooting Build Failures

Building OpenWrt for Gateworks Products

Gateworks uses the OpenWrt Linux Distribution for its Board Support Package (BSP). From time to time, Gateworks may have patches against upstream OpenWrt to support some features which have not made it upstream or perhaps are not suitable for upstream OpenWrt. Additionally Gateworks provides a Makefile wrapper around OpenWrt to aid in pinning versions of Opensource tree's to versions that Gateworks has tested with.

For more information about the OpenWrt SDK and other features, visit Gateworks OpenWrt Wiki Page

OpenWrt BSP Branches

The Gateworks OpenWrt repository consist of a snapshot of upstream OpenWrt at specific points, with a few additional patches added on top that either had not made it upstream by that time, or add a gateworks directory consisting of Gateworks tested config files and JTAG flash image creation scripts. The repository can be found on the Gateworks GitHub openwrt page.

Our branch naming policy is as follows:

Our Git branches currently include:

14.08 - required for Avila/Cambria

  • 14-08 - Uses OpenWrt pinned from Aug 2014 (r42297)
    • Nightly: http://dev.gateworks.com/openwrt/14.08/
      • Please view the .manifest file per target to inspect installed packages + their respective versions
    • Based on OpenWrt r42297 (2014-08-25)
    • General:
      • Refreshed Gateworks patches
      • Refreshed Gateworks config files
      • Updated all feeds to latest versions as of 2014-08-27
      • Updated to latest wireless drivers
      • 80211ac support (ath10k/iwlabgn)
      • DFS Support in ath
      • Added HID Support to Ventana and Laguna
      • Added Bluetooth support (both btusb and ath3k) to Ventana and Laguna
      • Added ibt and ath3k Bluetooth firmwares to Ventana and Laguna
    • Ventana:
      • Add support for GW54xx/GW53xx/GW52xx/GW51xx/GW552x
      • Add gsc-daemon support for above boards
      • Add support for GW16081/GW16082/GW16082
      • Kernel: 3.14.16
      • Added sysupgrade support
    • Laguna
      • Kernel: 3.10.49
    • Avila / Cambria:
      • Kernel: to 3.10.49

If you are looking for our old OpenWrt BSP's such as the 13.06 or 12.08 from our old SVN repository please see on older revision of this page

Revision Log

You can see a revision history using the Github web interface:

OpenWrt BSP Pre-Built Binaries

To get an already built image to flash onto the SBC, please visit the following:

Building Pre-requisites

Gateworks has tested with LTS Ubuntu Releases. The suggested Ubuntu releases are 14.04 or 16.04. At the time of this writing, Gateworks does not recommend using Ubuntu 16.10.

On an Ubuntu (11.10, 14.04, 16.04) system for example the following should install all necessary pre-requisites:

sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential  ;# std dev tools
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev gawk flex git-core gettext quilt libssl-dev ;# other libs/tools needed by OpenWrt Buildroot

Ubuntu 14.04 Notes

Note: Ubuntu 14.04 There is a known bug with Ubuntu 14.04 when building Python 2.7. that may occur. Because the system Python is used during this build, you may encounter the following error:

ImportError: No module named _sysconfigdata_nd
configure: error: python2.7 interpreter not found
make[3]: *** [~/openwrt-next/build_dir/target-arm_cortex-a9+neon_musl-1.1.11_eabi/Python-2.7.11/.configured_yy
yyyyyyy] Error 1

In order to fix it, please execute the following:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/plat-*/_sysconfigdata_nd.py /usr/lib/python2.7/

Please ensure your development box has all of the listed packages installed before proceeding and note that your development box will need access to the internet in order to download the files for the development tree.

WARNING! Building with GCC 4.7.x is not fully supported. Please use 4.8.2+ or 4.6.x and below. We have also found 6.2+ to have some issues

Note The following pre-requisites must be met in order to build OpenWrt firmware for the Gateworks product families:

Downloaded Source Files

OpenWrt uses a Linux build system called buildroot. Like all Linux build systems it consists of recipes that go through the process of fetching, patching, compiling, packaging various applications. The 'fetching' process involves downloading source tarballs from the Internet (which is why an Internet connection is required). OpenWrt will fetch all sources into the 'dl' directory in the OpenWrt tree (ie 14.08/dl from the Gateworks directory). To avoid downloading sources each time you do a clean build it is recommended that you create a static location on your development host to store downloaded packages and symlink this to the dl directory. The Gateworks Makefile which fetches OpenWrt and patches it, will create this link for you if the /usr/src/dl directory exists on your development host, so if you create that and make it writable by your development user all downloads will go there automatically and be able to be used for subsequent builds. This not only helps reduce build time but it can also help if a package's source isn't available because of a site or mirror being down.

Step by Step Instructions

To support OpenWrt for the Gateworks products, we maintain a patchset that is generic to all our standard product families.

Step 1: Getting Source Code

There are multiple code branches (see above for recommended branch per product), please checkout the one you prefer with the following commands:

Step 2: Building

Our OpenWrt Git repository has a 'gateworks' directory added consisting of a Makefile providing targets that aim to simplify the entire process of:

Once the branch has been checked out from the Gateworks GitHub account, you are ready to build. The Gateworks Makefile provides the following targets:

Artifacts

The build process will take some time depending on your Internet connection and host system. On an Intel Quad Core @ 3.10GHz the build takes a couple of hours to build all product families and takes appx 15GB of disk space.

The resulting kernel/rootfs files will be in the bin/<target> directory. For Example, a 256MB flash Ventana image is located at:

bin/imx6/gateworks-imx6-ventana-squashfs-nand_normal.ubi

For information about loading the resulting firmware onto a board see the per-board instructions:

Step 3: Installing

To install the OpenWrt image onto the Gateworks SBC, please follow the instructions:

Building JTAG Binary File

Creating JTAG Binaries to flash with the GW16042 is easily done with the targets in the makefile within the gateworks directory:

# Make a 'jtagable' images for Ventana
make -C gateworks/ images/ventana

# Make a 'jtagable' image for Laguna
make -C gateworks/ images/laguna

# Make both Ventana and Laguna 'jtagable' images
make -C gateworks/ images

The resulting flash firmware image will be gateworks/images/.

To flash the file to the board, please see this link: JTAG Programming Instructions

Customizing

Once a target has been built using the above instructions, a user may customize their image.

OpenWrt can be customized by running the make menuconfig command. In this new window, you can select/deselect packages you want installed. If kernel customization is required, a make kernel_menuconfig will open the make menu for the kernel.

Once complete, a simple make -j8 V=s will re-run the make command to re-create the rootfs.

Please read more at this page here.

Updating to Latest Gateworks Source

The steps to update your current project to the latest Gateworks patches varies depending on the branch you're trying to update. Please see the below two sections that help to detail this out. However, please note that using Git is the most developer friendly.

After this is complete, please continue to build as normal. For more detail on working with git, please refer to this site. For information on git pull, please refer to this page. For information about git rebase, please refer to this page.

Troubleshooting Build Failures

One of the most commonly occurring errors that we have run into are source URL's disappearing which causes the source files to not be there during build-time. To help alleviate this, Gateworks has put up source tarballs at our development site. Our build environment takes advantage of this by uploading files for feeds that we require and automatically selecting them if all other options fail. In general, it will 1: look for the tarball locally; 2: try the original source URL; and 3: try our dev site. Below are other issues that may crop up:

  1. Finding an Error - Often the error will be 'reported' at the end of the build. However, the error will have actually occurred earlier on. Scroll up in the logs and look for an error. Typically it is from a package or dependency that was not able to be downloaded.
  2. Missing Dependencies - The build will pull files from mirrors around the web including a Gateworks mirror at http://dev.gateworks.com/sources. If for some reason you can't download dependencies then you likely have a network issue. Note that files can be placed manually in the dl directory to avoid downloading.
  3. Errors - By default, the build is ran on many threads with the parameter -j8. To achieve better debugging information after a failure, re-run the build with the following -j1 flag from the trunk directory:
    make -j1 V=s