Date: 2014-01-10

Baserock 13 is released

The Baserock team and Codethink Limited are proud to announce version 13 of the Baserock system.

Baserock is a toolset and development methodology for developing embedded and appliance Linux systems, plus a set of reference system images to build.

What's new in this version?

Trove added (source hosting)

Trove is a server applicance for git hosting for Baserock. In addition to a git server, with cgit for web access, it provides access control using Gitano, and mirroring and conversion of upstream source code into git. Baserock builds everything from source stored in git,

POWER 64-bit prototype port added

We have added prototype level support for the 64-bit POWER architecture (ppc64) in Baserock. The architecture bootstrap was done using the morph cross-bootstrap command, which automates most of the work of getting an initial, minimal development system built on a new architecture, after support for the new architecture has been added to toolchain, kernel, and other essential components.

Morph changes

Morph is the build and workflow tool used in developing with Baserock.

New features added:

New CPU architecture: ppc64 architecture (POWER PC 64-bit). This is the change specific for Morph. There are changes to the morphologies (in a different git repository) to actually build such systems.
morph build and morph deploy now allow .morph suffixes in command line arguments. The suffixes are stripped internally, so Morph behaves as if the suffix wasn't there in the first place.
The morph build command is now a new implementation. The old implementation is still available as morph old-build, just in case the new code is buggy, but will be removed in a future release. Likewise, morph deploy has a new implementation, but no old-deploy. Both new implementations should work exactly as the old ones, except for bugs.

Bugs fixed:

When Morph reads git configuration files, it now correctly handles whitespace at the end of configuration values.
morph deploy no longer creates and pushes a temporary build branch. Pushing it wasn't useful, merely wasteful.
morph deploy now allows cross-architecture deployments, and and morph cross-bootstrap checks that the system is being built supports the target architecture.

Other user-visible changes:

When preparing to build (when construcing the build graph), Morph now reports the ref (SHA1) it uses for each stratum.
Systems being built must now have at least one stratum, and the strata in a system must have at least one chunk that is built using the normal (staging area) mode, rather than bootstrap mode.

GENIVI Baseline

We've updated the Baserock GENIVI Baseline to the G-1.1 release of GENIVI.

How do I get started?

You can find a quick start guide on the Baserock wiki and also a short guide on developing with Baserock which follows on from the quick start guide and shows you how to get to the point of proving you can build Baserock within Baserock.

From that point on, your imagination is the limit. You can follow our development in the Git repositories we publish.

How do I get in contact?

The Baserock project has an IRC channel and mailing list for developers to gather and discuss anything associated with Baserock. It is strongly recommended that you use the IRC and lists to contact the team for anything associated with the public development of Baserock. We also have a mailing list for announcements which will be notified of any new releases or big developments in Baserock.

If you find a bug in Baserock, we'd like to hear from you. You can find our bug reporting guidelines on the Baserock wiki and we will do our best to help.

We hope you enjoy experimenting with Baserock and look forward to hearing about any cool things you do with our work.