LibreMesh firmware build tool

LiMe build is a tool to easily and locally compile a LibreMesh firmware image. It also creates a development environment.

It consists in a Makefile file, so it is executed using the GNU "make" command.

CopyRight libremesh.org / Distributed under license GPLv3

Get in Touch with LibreMesh Community

Mailing Lists

The project offers the following mailing lists

• dev@lists.libre-mesh.org - This list is used for general development related work.
• users@lists.libre-mesh.org - This list is used for project organizational purposes. And for user specific questions.

IRC Channel

The project uses an IRC channel on freenode.net

• #libremesh - a public channel for everyone to join and participate

Preparing the Compilation Environment

In Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install \
git subversion zlib1g-dev gawk flex unzip bzip2 gettext build-essential \
libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev binutils cpp psmisc docbook-to-man

Additionally, if your system is 64bits

 sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib

Basic Usage

An example of basic usage would be:

make T=ar71xx P=generic J=4

Where:

• T indicates the target
• P indicates the profile
• J indicates the number of cores to use

Target makes reference to hardware architecture or a specific hardware device.

Profile references to a libremesh flavour, the generic one is the standard but each community network might has its own.

To see the list of targets/profiles available type:

make info

Extended Usage

To compile an image for hardware with less than 4 MB of flash memory

make T=ar71xx-mini P=basic

To include more packages than the profile ones

make T=ar71xx PACKAGES="pkg1 pkg2..."

To specify manually the list of the packages using a void profile

make T=ar71xx P=custom PACKAGES="pkg1 pkg2..."

To work in developer mode (uses lime read-write repository)

make DEV=1 T=ar71xx P=generic

Or to use your own LiMe packages git repository and/or OpenWRT/LEDE (must be executed the first time make is invoked or after a make clean).

make LIME_GIT="http://foo.git" T=ar71xx P=generic OWRT_GIT="http://foo.git"

To synchronize config files from configs/ dir to existing target

make T=ar71xx sync_config

---

If you need extra packages launch menuconfig before compiling (from openwrt):

make T=ar71xx menuconfig

After that, the new config file will be applied to destination target and also it will by copied to build/configs directory

---

To run kernel menuconfig (from openwrt), in this case config file will be not copied because it is not directly compatible with configs/target/kernel_config:

make T=ar71xx kernel_menuconfig

---

To run just the initial code checkout:

make T=ar71xx checkout

---

To clean all:

make clean

---

To clean just lime packages from a target

make T=ar71xx clean_lime

---

Branches in lime-build

The idea behind lime-build is to use one branch per each lime-packages branch. So to compile the lime-packages branch "develop" the lime-build branch develop must be used (same for releases).

The default branch is always the last stable release. If you need to compile another branch of LibreMesh (list of the existing branches) you can easy change it using git. To list the available branches:

git branch -a

To switch to a specific lime-build branch:

git checkout <your favorite branch>

Note that a lime branch involves a specific OpenWRT/LEDE branch and also a specific set of feeds. So using lime-build branch develop to compile lime-packages branch release XX.YY would probably result in a non working firmware. Anyway if you want to try this you can specify which branch of lime-packaged has to be used in combination with current lime-build branch (UPDATE=1 might be required in order to fetch the branch files).

make T=ar71xx LIME_GIT_BRANCH=develop UPDATE=1

Directory structure

There are several directories and files. This is the functionality for each of them:

• Makefile: the main makefile

• targets.mk: contains all information related with targets.

• profiles.mk: contains all information related with profiles.

• build: directory with source files

• build/configs: if you do some change in config file using "menuconfig" option, the new config is saved here

• dl: download folder for OpenWRT packages

• targets: config files for each kind of hardware.

• output: output directory for compiled images firmwares

• files: everything inside will be directly copied to the root of the system firmware image

• scripts: special directory to execute scripts before and/or after the compilation process, see scripts/README