Build RIOT-OS with Podman
Summary
This article is a tip that explains how it is possible to build a RIOT-OS application with Podman and the official build container. And I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Podman and RIOT-OS.
Podman
Some Linux distribution, like Fedora chosen to officially only support Podman instead of Docker for some available reason:
- It is daemonless container engine.
- It is rootless.
- It follows Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards.
- It is safer than the Docker engine.
- It introduces the notion of Pods: a group of container(s) that share storage or network resources.
Moreover, Podman is able to use the images built by the Docker engine and has been stored in Docker registry.
However, most of the time the Podman commands are identical to that of Docker, the a simple alias is enough to be misleading: alias docker=podman.
But as Podman is rootless and safer than Docker, then sometimes it is necessary to specify additional security parameters.
RIOT-OS
RIOT-OS is a memory-constrained RTOS, such as Contiki, that provides real-time and multithreading abilities, and it runs on processors from 8bits to 32bits.
It was designed for IoT devices then to be low power consumption and it provides three very complete network stacks including some protocols as:
The RIOT-OS project also provides some useful tools including a build container (riotdocker).
And the build environment of RIOT-OS offers a Makefile to build an application with this container simply by setting the variable BUILD_IN_DOCKER to 1. Then the prebuilt image is downloaded and instantiated to execute the make command.
By default, this feature is configured to be used with the Docker engine, but it is possible to override some variables from the build environment either to use a custom prebuilt image, either use another engine or to use custom engine parameters.
Then here, we will use these environments variable to instantiate a container with Podman (instead of Docker) and with the required parameters.
Tip of the day
In the following example, we build the Helloworld application for a STM32 Discovery board. To do that we specify the engine by setting the variable DOCKER to the value podman. The variable DOCKER_USER is set empty because in the variable DOCKER_RUN_FLAGS the parameter --userns is set to keep-id to map the uid:gid of the current rootless user (from host) with the values that will be used into the container.
export BUILD_IN_DOCKER=1
export DOCKER="podman"
export DOCKER_USER=""
export DOCKER_RUN_FLAGS="--rm -i -t --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable --userns=keep-id"
export DOCKER_MAKE_ARGS="-j$(nproc)"
make BOARD=stm32l476g-disco
Launching build container using image "riot/riotbuild:latest".
podman run --rm -i -t --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --security-opt label=disable --userns=keep-id -v '/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris:/etc/localtime:ro' -v '/home/tperrot/dev/tprrt/pwm-ramp-gen/RIOT:/data/riotbuild/riotbase:delegated' -e 'RIOTBASE=/data/riotbuild/riotbase' -e 'CCACHE_BASEDIR=/data/riotbuild/riotbase' -e 'BUILD_DIR=/data/riotbuild/riotbase/build' -v '/home/tperrot/dev/tprrt/pwm-ramp-gen:/data/riotbuild/riotproject:delegated' -e 'RIOTPROJECT=/data/riotbuild/riotproject' -e 'RIOTCPU=/data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu' -e 'RIOTBOARD=/data/riotbuild/riotbase/boards' -e 'RIOTMAKE=/data/riotbuild/riotbase/makefiles' -v '/home/tperrot/dev/tprrt/pwm-ramp-gen/.git:/home/tperrot/dev/tprrt/pwm-ramp-gen/.git:delegated' -e 'BOARD=stm32l476g-disco' -w '/data/riotbuild/riotproject/' 'riot/riotbuild:latest' make 'BOARD=stm32l476g-disco' -j8
Building application "hello-world" for "stm32l476g-disco" with MCU "stm32".
[INFO] cloning stm32cmsis
fatal: not a git repository: /data/riotbuild/riotbase/../.git/modules/RIOT
Cloning into '/data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/include/vendor/cmsis/l4'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 364, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (364/364), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (71/71), done.
remote: Total 364 (delta 309), reused 344 (delta 289), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (364/364), 709.56 KiB | 561.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (309/309), done.
HEAD is now at e442c72 Release v1.6.1
[INFO] updating stm32cmsis /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/include/vendor/cmsis/l4/.pkg-state.git-downloaded
echo e442c72651e8d4757f6562acc14da949644944ce > /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/include/vendor/cmsis/l4/.pkg-state.git-downloaded
[INFO] patch stm32cmsis
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/boards/stm32l476g-disco
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/core
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/drivers
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/cortexm_common
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/periph
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/drivers/periph_common
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/stmclk
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys/auto_init
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/cortexm_common/periph
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/cpu/stm32/vectors
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys/malloc_thread_safe
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys/newlib_syscalls_default
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys/pm_layered
"make" -C /data/riotbuild/riotbase/sys/stdio_uart
text data bss dec hex filename
8900 112 2300 11312 2c30 /data/riotbuild/riotproject/bin/stm32l476g-disco/hello-world.elf