Tool stitch out of order - you need to build only once

Question

I have several platforms that use the same buildroot. They differ in buildroot packages. Is there a way in buildroot where I can configure the construction of the tool chain only once, and then only packages and targets are built on it.

Example image without make make (therefore the chain is not damaged):

1) Platform A updates some conf files in the target root files / etc (I use the platform for buildroot configuration files) when buildroot is being built. 2) Platform B does not require conf files, but since make clean fails (while the buildroot configuration files of platform B are used); unnecessary / etc / are present in the target. If you do the cleaning, you also need to rebuild the tool chain.

Thanks for any answers.

Answer 1

Yes. See http://free-electrons.com/~thomas/pub/using-buildroot-real-project.pdf for some unfinished slides about this.

What you can do is collect once to cross-compile the toolchain (using Buildroot or crosstool-NG), and then tell Buildroot to use this pre-built cross-compilation toolchain as the “External Toolchain”. In this way, Buildroot will use this existing compiler, and with every full Buildroot restore, you will save the full assembly time of the tool chain.

Please note that this only works with fairly modern versions of Buildroot, i.e. probably less than one year.