Known for its portability, it might come at no surprise that NetBSD (and pkgsrc as well) is also easy to cross build on other platforms and even other hosts. Building NetBSD on Linux can be very convenient, as it's far easier to get access to high-performance Linux powered machines than to NetBSD ones. So let's go through the process and build a NetBSD/amd64 release on a Debian host, using an unprivileged user account.
First, we will need to install some development packages on the host machine:
apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev flex
Then, we can download and extract source sets for the NetBSD version we want to build. At the time of writing, latest NetBSD release is 6.1.4:
wget ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1.4/source/sets/gnusrc.tgz wget ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1.4/source/sets/sharesrc.tgz wget ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1.4/source/sets/src.tgz wget ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1.4/source/sets/syssrc.tgz
for file in *.tgz do tar xfz $file done
We can now build the cross compiler:
cd usr/src
./build.sh -U -u -m amd64 tools
Compilation results:
===> Summary of results:
build.sh command: ./build.sh -U -u -m amd64 tools
build.sh started: Thu Aug 28 21:49:19 UTC 2014
NetBSD version: 6.1.4
MACHINE: amd64
MACHINE_ARCH: x86_64
Build platform: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 x86_64
HOST_SH: /bin/sh
No $TOOLDIR/bin/nbmake, needs building.
Bootstrapping nbmake
TOOLDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64
DESTDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/destdir.amd64
RELEASEDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/releasedir
Created /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64/bin/nbmake
Updated makewrapper: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64/bin/nbmake-amd64
Tools built to /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64
build.sh ended: Thu Aug 28 21:56:48 UTC 2014
Here is more information about configuration options used in those examples:
-U Set MKUNPRIVED=yes; build without requiring root privileges,
install from an UNPRIVED build with proper file permissions.
-u Set MKUPDATE=yes; do not run "make cleandir" first.
Without this, everything is rebuilt, including the tools.
-m mach Set MACHINE to mach; not required if NetBSD native.
Once our toolchain is ready, we can now build NetBSD itself:
./build.sh -U -u -m amd64 release
Compilation results:
===> Summary of results:
build.sh command: ./build.sh -U -u -m amd64 release
build.sh started: Thu Aug 28 21:57:54 UTC 2014
NetBSD version: 6.1.4
MACHINE: amd64
MACHINE_ARCH: x86_64
Build platform: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 x86_64
HOST_SH: /bin/sh
TOOLDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64
DESTDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/destdir.amd64
RELEASEDIR path: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/releasedir
Updated makewrapper: /home/admin/usr/src/obj/tooldir.Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64/bin/nbmake-amd64
Successful make release
build.sh ended: Thu Aug 28 23:21:28 UTC 2014
From there, building an ISO image takes only a few seconds:
./build.sh -U -u -m amd64 iso-image
We can now try to boot the resulting ISO image:
Unsurprisingly, it works as expected! Welcome to NetBSD :-)
Copyright © 2009-2026 Jonathan David Allen Moore
