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Comment by bubblesnort | Hacker News Reader

No. It creates a root filesystem that follows your choices of what should be included and tries to be as minimal and small as possible by default. Very suitable for embedded devices and lightweight virtual machines. You can have it build a kernel as well. I use the ability to create a cpio archive for an initramfs on the Linux boxes.

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I use buildroot to make a commercial product.

It builds the bootloader, the kernel, initramfs and rootfs, and then my application(s) all installed in the right place and connected to systemd. The output is a set of images that burn into their respective partitions on eMMC.

If you're a masochist, there's also Yocto. It'll build your compiler and crosstools as well as the entire system image.

Buildroot will build the cross toolchain too unless you specify BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL, right? And likewise you can configure yocto to use an external toolchain.

A lot of the byproducts are configurable. You could configure the system to not use an initramfs, use only an initramfs/squashfs, etc. It is a really great tool with great documentation.

I agree that Yocto is a bit masochistic by comparison, but vendors like it because its primary purpose is to enable shitty vendor forks.

I reckon you are already aware of this if you’re using it to generate an initramfs, but for those reading along, you can also use it as a docker image

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