Changing Buildroot Revision

As promised, the first in a line of (hopefully) useful posts. Today we cover three of the main effects of switching from one revision of the Gumstix buildroot to another. This can happen if you upgrade deliberately, or if you order a new batch and they happen to ship with a different revision.

• Binary Incompatibility – I’m not sure as to the minimum set of changes required to make binaries incompatible with the system, but if you change Buildroot revision it is something to look out for. For example, I am developing on both r773 and r1161 and you can guarantee binaries compiled for one won’t work on the other. You may get messages such as “unrecognised character : ]” or just an outright “you fool, what are you doing?” (both paraphrased).
• Module Renaming – If I use the revisions mentioned above again, I can draw on the example of the sound modules. The sound driver in r773 was pxa-ac97, whereas in r1161 you use snd-pxa2xx-ac97, snd-pcm-oss, and snd-mixer-oss. If you’re not expecting it then that sort of change can really throw you.
• Different Default Applications – Sometimes applications are added to or removed from the Buildroot default build. For example, in r773 you had brec and bplay (the basis of various of our demos due to their ease of use), whereas these are not included by default in r1161. Applications may also be compiled to a different place within the Buildroot, Python is an example of this between r773 and r1161.

Those are the three main effects that I have come across, feel free to mention other ones in the comments section (or to correct my paraphrased error messages if you so wish =P ).