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WARNING: When you build a ROM image from the Canoeboot build system, please ensure that you flash the appropriate ROM image from bin/, NOT elf/. The elf/ coreboot ROMs do not contain payloads. Canoeboot’s build system builds no-payload ROMs under elf/, and payloads separately under elf/. Then it copies from elf/ and inserts payloads from elf/, and puts the final ROM images (containing payloads) in bin/. This design is more efficient, and permits many configurations without needless duplication of work. More info is available in the cbmk maintenance manual

Canoeboot’s build system is named cbmk, short for CanoeBoot MaKe, and this document describes how to use it. With this guide, you can know how to compile canoeboot from the available source code.

The following document describes how cbmk works, and how you can make changes to it: canoeboot maintenance manual

Canoeboot’s build system defaults to a single build thread, but you can change it by doing e.g.

export XBMK_THREADS=4

This would make cbmk run on 4 threads.

More specifically: when compiling source trees via script/trees, -jTHREADS is passed, where THREADS is the number of threads. This is also set when running xz commands for compression, using the -t option.

Please read about environmental variables in the build instructions, before running cbmk. You should set your variables accordingly, though you do not technically need to; some of them may be useful, e.g. CBMK_THREADS (sets the number of build threads).

This version, if hosted live on canoeboot.org, assumes that you are using the cbmk git repository, which you can download using the instructions on the code review page.

Including Canoeboot 20231026 and newer, all releases have cbwww.git (the website) and cbwww-img.git (images for the website) archived in the src tar archive for that release; Canoeboot documentation is written in Markdown (pandoc variant). You can find markdown files and images under src/www/ and src/img/, respectively.

If you’re working with release documentation, you don’t get the full HTML files (such as the one you’re viewing now, if you’re reading this page in a web browser), so either read the Markdown files directly, or compile them to HTML using the Untitled Static Site Generator (which is what the Canoeboot project uses to generate HTML from those files).

NOTE: av.canoeboot.org is hardcoded as the domain name where images are pointed to, in cbwww.git, so you will need to replace these references in your local version, unless you’re happy to just continue using those.

Canoeboot’s build system uses Git, extensively. You should perform the steps below, even if you’re using a release archive.

Before you use the build system, please know: the build system itself uses Git extensively, when downloading software like coreboot and patching it.

You should make sure to initialize your Git properly, before you begin or else the build system will not work properly. Do this:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

Change the name and email address to whatever you want, when doing this.

You may also want to follow more of the steps here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup

You should ensure that the python command runs python 3, on your system. Python2 is unused by cbmk or anything that it pulls down as modules.

If building on Debian/Ubuntu based systems, you can achieve that via:

sudo apt install python-is-python3

On Fedora, you can use the following

sudo dnf install python-unversioned-command

Actual development/testing is always done using cbmk directly, and this includes when building from source. Here are some instructions to get you started:

Make sure date/hwclock report the correct time and date on your system, because parts of the build process download from HTTPS servers and wrong time or date can cause connections to be dropped during negotiation.

Check config/dependencies/ for list of supported distros.

Canoeboot includes a script that automatically installs build dependencies according to the selected GNU+Linux distro.

For example:

./mk dependencies ubuntu

or

./mk dependencies debian

or

./mk dependencies fedora38

or

./mk dependencies arch

NOTE: In case of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or derived distros for that specific release, use the dedicated configuration file (the Trisquel 11 config symlinks to this):

./mk dependencies ubuntu2004

Technically, any GNU+Linux distribution can be used to build canoeboot. However, you will have to write your own script for installing build dependencies.

Canoeboot MaKe (cbmk) automatically runs all necessary commands; for example, ./mk -b coreboot will automatically build the required payloads if not already compiled.

As a result, you can now (after installing the correct build dependencies) run just a single command, from a fresh Git clone, to build all ROM images:

./mk -b coreboot

or even just build specific ROM images, e.g.:

./mk -b coreboot x60

or get a list of supported build targets:

./mk -b coreboot list

If you wish to build payloads, you can also do that. For example:

./mk -b grub

./mk -b seabios

./mk -b u-boot

Previous steps will be performed automatically. However, you can still run individual parts of the build system manually, if you choose. This may be beneficial when you’re making changes, and you wish to test a specific part of cbmk.

Check the cbmk maintenance manual for guidance. You may for example want to modify a config, e.g.:

./mk -m coreboot x200_8mb

Or perhaps add a new board! The maintenance manual will teach you how the Canoeboot build system (cbmk) works!

So you compiled your Canoeboot image? Congratulations!

Before you flash, please make sure that you dumped two copies of the original firmware just in case (verifying the hashes of each dump, to ensure that they match), using the -r option in flashprog.

NOTE: Canoeboot standardises on flashprog now, as of 3 May 2024, which is a fork of flashrom.

Markdown file for this page: https://canoeboot.org/docs/build/index.md

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