Introduction

With snapcraft 2.5 which can be installed on the upcoming 16.04 Xenial Xerus with apt or consumed from the 2.5 tag on github we have included two interesting plugins: kbuild and kernel.

The kbuild plugin is interesting in itself, but here we will be discussing the kernel plugin which is based out of the kbuild one.

A note of caution though, this kernel plugin is still not considered production ready. This doesn’t mean you will build kernels that don’t work on today’s version of Ubuntu Core; but caution is required as the nature of rolling, which is what this kernel plugin targets, can still change. Additionally we may still modify the plugin’s options for the part setup itself.

Last but not least we are introducing, given the nature of kernel building, some experimental cross building support. The reason for this is that cross compiling a kernel is well understood and straightforward.

Walkthrough

Objective

The final objective is to obtain a kernel snap; we will want to create a kernel that would work on the 410c DragonBoard from Arrow which features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410. To do so we will take a look at the 96boards wiki and the 96boards published kernel.

Setup

You must be running from a Xenial Xerus system and have at least snapcraft 2.5 installed, make sure by running:

$ snacraft -v
2.5

If not, then:

$ apt update
$ apt install snapcraft

Cloning the kernel

Since the kernel is the main project and to iterate quickly it makes sense to clone it and start snapcrafting from there, so let’s clone

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/96boards/linux

Depending on when you do this, you might need to also cherry pick 6113222fa5386433645c7707b4239a9eba444523

Creating the base snapcraft.yaml

Go into the recently cloned kernel directory and let’s get started with a yaml that has the standard entries for someone familiar with snapcraft.yaml:

name: 96boards-kernel
version: 4.4.0
summary: 96boards reference kernel with qualcomm firmware
description: this is an example on how to build a kernel snap.

Now this is a kernel snap, so let’s add that information in; this is rather important since if not done, the resulting snap might as well be some sort of asset holder; by adding the type of snap, snappy Ubuntu Core will know what to do:

name: 96boards-kernel
version: 4.4.0
summary: 96boards reference kernel with qualcomm firmware
description: this is an example on how to build a kernel snap.
type: kernel

That’s all we need with regards to headers.

Adding parts

kernel

So let’s add some parts, the first part will use the new kernel plugin, This plugin’s help can be seen by running:

snapcraft help kernel

The kernel plugin is based out of the kbuild one, so there are some extra parameters we can use from that plugin which can be seen by running:

snapcraft help kbuild

And finally these plugins make use of snapcraft’s source helpers which can be discovered by runnning:

snapcraft help sources

So when we look at the wiki again we will notice there are 2 defconfigs, defconfig and distro.conf. Even though distro.config defines squashfs support to be built as a module, let’s make use of kconfigs and explicitly set it (we also set a couple of other kernel configurations). We will build 2 device trees making use of kernel-device-trees. In kernel-initrd-modules we will mention squashfs as we need support for it to boot.

Given that particular piece of information let’s work on adding this part:

name: 96boards-kernel
version: 4.4.0
summary: 96boards reference kernel with qualcomm firmware
description: this is an example on how to build a kernel snap.
type: kernel

parts:
        plugin: kernel
        source: .
        kdefconfig: [defconfig, distro.config]
        kconfigs:
            - CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-96boards"
            - CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=n
            - CONFIG_SQUASHFS=m
        kernel-initrd-modules:
            - squashfs
        kernel-image-target: Image
        kernel-device-trees:
            - qcom/apq8016-sbc
            - qcom/msm8916-mtp

firmware

To run this kernel on the DragonBoard we will need to get some firmware from Qualcomm, so head over to https://developer.qualcomm.com/download/db410c/linux-board-support-package-v1.2.zip and get the zip file. Extract the firmware tarball from inside that zip and create a firmware part:

name: 96boards-kernel
version: 4.4.0
summary: 96boards reference kernel with qualcomm firmware
description: this is an example on how to build a kernel snap.
type: kernel

parts:
    kernel:
        plugin: kernel
        source: .
        kdefconfig: [defconfig, distro.config]
        kconfigs:
            - CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-96boards"
            - CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=n
            - CONFIG_SQUASHFS=m
        kernel-initrd-modules:
            - squashfs
        kernel-image-target: Image
        kernel-device-trees:
            - qcom/apq8016-sbc
            - qcom/msm8916-mtp
    firmware:
        plugin: tar-content
        source: firmware.tar
        destination: lib/firmware

Building

Now that we have a complete snapcraft.yaml we will proceed to build. If you did this on a 64bit system, you will be able to cross compile this snap, just run:

$ snapcraft --target-arch arm64

This build will take a while, an average of 30 minutes give or take. You will eventually see a message that says Snapped 96boards-kernel_4.4.0_arm64.snap. That means you are done and have successfully created a kernel snap.