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Nerves System BR provides the common logic for building Nerves Systems using Buildroot. If you're new to Nerves, you probably don't want to look at this repository. Please check out the official documentation.

For examples of using nerves_system_br, take a look at the officially supported hardware systems:

We only officially support easily obtained hardware, but that doesn't mean that Nerves only works on these boards. If it's possible to use Buildroot to create a Linux root filesystem for your hardware, then it's possible that Nerves can be made to run. The general steps to supporting a new board are the following:

  1. Create a minimal Buildroot defconfig that boots and runs on the board. This doesn't use Nerves at all.
  2. If the defconfig requires a writable root filesystem, figure out how to make it read-only. This should be pretty easy unless you're using systemd. Since Nerves uses a custom init system, keep in mind for later that systemd may be helping initialize something on the board that will need to be done manually later.
  3. Take a look at the Flash memory layout and compare that to the layouts used in one of the supported systems. We use fwup to create images. There's a lot of variety in how one can lay out Flash memory and deal with things like failbacks. At this point, just see if you can get fwup to create an image.
  4. Clone one of the official systems that seems close for your board. Update the nerves_defconfig based on the Buildroot defconfig that works.
  5. Build the system using mix or manually by running the create-build.sh script.

Non-mix way of using Nerves

It is highly recommended that all users follow the official documentation on using systems. However, advanced users have found the information to be helpful, so it hasn't been deleted. This ONLY works on Linux.

After you have manually built Nerves, activate it before running any Elixir or Erlang build tools on your application.

source build/nerves-env.sh

In the above line, substitute build for whatever directory was used to build the Nerve System. If you downloaded a pre-built Nerves System, source the nerves-env.sh inside of it. When using a rebuilt system, the crosscompiler toolchain must also be downloaded. See the toolchains project. As stated before, the Nerves mix integration takes care of this for you.

This step has to be done each time you launch a shell. The key environment settings updated by the script are the PATH variable and a set of variables that direct build tools such as rebar, mix, relx, and other Makefiles to invoke the cross-compiler.

Enabling a native library or application

Buildroot comes with support for a zillion C libraries and applications. Nerves enables the minimum number of packages to keep the base system image small. Examples of packages that you may want to add are things like graphics and UI frameworks, command line utilities, databases, and file system utilities. To browse available packages, go to your build directory and run:

make menuconfig

If you can't find a package, try typing / to search for it. After you have enabled a package, save your changes and exit menuconfig. The changes are saved to the .config file in your build directory. To save them to your system's nerves_defconfig file, run make savedefconfig.

Enabling an application or library is only part of the process to getting it to work. If that package needs to write to the filesystem, it may need to be configured to write to /root or another location since Nerves keeps the root filesystem readonly. This is done on purpose to avoid corrupting the root filesystem.

Be aware that Buildroot caches the root filesystem between builds and that when you deselect a configuration option, it will not disappear from the Nerves root file system image until a clean build.

Enabling a Linux kernel driver

If you have a piece of hardware that requires a special Linux driver that isn't enabled by default, run:

make linux-menuconfig

This will let you config kernel options. When done, save and exit. Like before, the configuration is saved to your build directory. To make the change permanent, run make linux-update-defconfig.

Enabling simple commandline utilities

If you're looking for many standard commandline utilities like ls(1), dd(1), cat(1), etc., they'll be in a package called Busybox. Nerves disables most of them since it uses the Erlang, Elixir, or LFE shells. To enable more of them, run:

make busybox-menuconfig

Just like the other configuration menus, when you exit menuconfig, the options will only be stored in your build directory. To make them permanent, save the .config (see build/busybox-*/.config) to your configuration directory. You will need to run make menuconfig to update the location of the Busybox configuration.