Building instructions

[febs]

As per the reddit thread, I am writing about the project here.

Thanks for it in the first place.
I would like to fiddle with the project but I am not much into embedded computing.
Would it be possible to kindly provide a quick howto about how to actually build an image with buildroot and retroarch?

I personally have some experience building the Linux kernel and with "make menuconfig" for what it's worth.

My objective would be to build this for the raspberry pi 4 (that thing you wrote on reddit about lowering the boot time down to 2 seconds is so sexy 😉) and for an odd board using an Allwinner A13 SoC.

Thank you so much for any help.

[aduskett]

Hey! Sorry about the late reply! I've been incredibly busy with a new job.

I decided to change how everything is built by using docker containers. Check out the develop branch, which should have a much better readme.md file on how to get going.

I can test with an RPI4 a bit later as well!

[febs]

Thank you very much for your reply, I'll look into that.

[aduskett]

Thank you very much for your reply, I'll look into that.

No worries! I actually did a ton of work this weekend to get Dracut whipped into shape!
I also updated Buildroot to the latest version along with retroarch. Today I am going to do some testing with the RPI4 as well!

[aduskett]

Thank you very much for your reply, I'll look into that.

For what it's worth, the develop branch now has a raspberrypi4 and raspberrypi3 config

[febs]

Thank you!

[aduskett]

Thank you!

No worries! I also just pushed a new init system for docker. I need to add a readme for the env.json file, but now you can specify fragments to apply to the config before building.

[Roet-Ivar]

Hi @aduskett ! Is there a way to know if the build is making any progress, mine seems to be stuck here forever? (I'm using WSL2)

[aduskett]

Hi @Roet-Ivar !

I just pushed a massive update that does the following:

  - New build system using make
  - Updated retroarch to 1.20.0
  - Updated retroarch assets to 1.19.0
  - Updated readme.md
  - Uses Docker for building
  - Updated README.md
  - X86 KMS uses kernel 6.12
  - Updated buildroot to 2024.02.9
  - Removed Dracut and Plymouth

TLDR: run make build and see if that works now. I have only tested building in Linux, so I'm not sure if WSL2 will work! I hope so!

Thanks!

Adam

[aduskett]

Hi @Roet-Ivar

I am bad at reading! Sorry about that!

Can you provide your .json file perchance?
Thanks!

Adam

[Roet-Ivar]

@aduskett thanks for still supporting this project!
I made a build manually which seems to spit out an sdcard-image for the pi3.

My problem now is that I'm trying to make it for the pi zero 2w which seem to require a custom config.
I saw that the original buildroot project have a config if that helps?

[aduskett]

@Roet-Ivar No worries at all!

Take a look at the rpi3.json file in the top-level docker/ directory for an example of how to apply new configs.
You will need to make a rpi2w.json file and copy a base-level defconfig to retroroot/configs to get everything to start building!

[Roet-Ivar]

@aduskett I've put together what I think is the correct config for building against a raspberry pi zero 2w, if I get it to work I could make a pull request.

From a clean pull inside WSL2 of the repo I'm faced with this error, maybe it doesn't work on WSL2 and docker-compose-v2.
(people suggest /r line endings, but I didn't pull the repo from windows git)

username:/mnt/c/Users/NIJ/Code/retroroot$ sudo make build
APPLY_CONFIGS=false \
VERBOSE=false \
ENV_FILES="x86_64.json" \
EXIT_AFTER_BUILD=true \
NO_BUILD=false \
CLEAN_AFTER_BUILD=false \
docker compose up --abort-on-container-exit
[+] Running 1/0
 ✔ Container buildroot-retroroot  Created                                                                          0.0s
Attaching to buildroot-retroroot
buildroot-retroroot  | /usr/bin/env: 'bash\r': No such file or directory
buildroot-retroroot  | /usr/bin/env: use -[v]S to pass options in shebang lines
buildroot-retroroot exited with code 127
Aborting on container exit...
[+] Stopping 1/0
 ✔ Container buildroot-retroroot  Stopped                                                                          0.0s
make: *** [Makefile:40: build] Error 127

EDIT: I'm currently making a manual docker container build (with "docker compose" v1 instead of "docker-compose" v2) from the latest branch using the instructions from the develop branch. I'll make an update post when tested.

[Roet-Ivar]

@aduskett Now it boots from the pi zero 2w, but stops at the login screen after the rainbow splash. Login in as root I can't find any packages for retroarch so I guess it skipped some packages. The config.txt and cmdline.txt didn't seem to have got included from the rpi3 board config I copied over either for some reason.

By manually adding the parameters from rpi3 config and cmdline I now have a 3s boot to login screen without any rainbow or text, which is cool. I'll make an ubuntu boot drive to see if I can re-build it as per your instructions.

Any ideas?