Host tools

Building tools for Linux

To allow distributions to distribute all possible tools in a generic way, avoiding the need of specific tools building for each machine, a tools only defconfig file is provided.

Using this, we can build the tools by doing:

$ make tools-only_defconfig
$ make tools-only

Building tools for Windows

If you wish to generate Windows versions of the utilities in the tools directory you can use MSYS2, a software distro and building platform for Windows.

Download the MSYS2 installer from https://www.msys2.org. Make sure you have installed all required packages below in order to build these host tools:

* gcc (9.1.0)
* make (4.2.1)
* bison (3.4.2)
* diffutils (3.7)
* openssl-devel (1.1.1.d)

Note the version numbers in these parentheses above are the package versions at the time being when writing this document. The MSYS2 installer tested is http://repo.msys2.org/distrib/x86_64/msys2-x86_64-20190524.exe.

There are 3 MSYS subsystems installed: MSYS2, MinGW32 and MinGW64. Each subsystem provides an environment to build Windows applications. The MSYS2 environment is for building POSIX compliant software on Windows using an emulation layer. The MinGW32/64 subsystems are for building native Windows applications using a linux toolchain (gcc, bash, etc), targeting respectively 32 and 64 bit Windows.

Launch the MSYS2 shell of the MSYS2 environment, and do the following:

$ make tools-only_defconfig
$ make tools-only

Building without Python

The tools-only builds bytes pylibfdt by default. To disable this, use the NO_PYTHON variable:

NO_PYTHON=1 make tools-only_defconfig tools-only