Added a new HOWTO to the OSADL Website: Use BuildRoot to create a Linux image for QEMU

By: Carsten Emde

Guest Editor Bogdan Cristea tells us about rapid prototyping of an embedded system using virtualization

Thanks to our Guest Editor Dr. Bogdan Cristea, we got a new HOWTO in OSADL's collection of HOWTOs. The new one contains a clear step-to-step description, how to use QEMU for rapid prototyping of an embedded device at a time when the hardware is not (yet) available.

Bogdan's work was inspired by the article "Efficient embedded software development using QEMU" (PDF) by Pradyumna Sampath and Rachana Rao, presented at the Eleventh Real Time Linux Workshop, 2009. The authors concluded: "Cross compiling the BSP and user-space applications for another platform is the most tedious and error prone stage of cross-platform development that requires repeated setting up of the environment variables and tool upgrades. Creating a virtualized native development environment for the applications is an efficient way to overcome these obstacles." A remaining step was to safely and quickly create a suitable image to boot the guest OS. The BuildRoot method closes this gap, and the newly provided HOWTO explains the steps to do it.

Thank you, Bogdan, for sharing your work!