fastlyos/netbox

The BusyBox of embedded network toolboxes

NetBox - Like BusyBox but for Networking

Westermo NetBox is a toolbox for embedded systems based on Buildroot.

NetBox provides easy access to all Westermo specific custimizations made to Linux and other Open Source projects used in WeOS. You can use it as the base for any application, but is strongly recommended for all use cases for container applications running in WeOS. Official WeOS container applications will be based on NetBox.

NetBox is built using the External Tree facility in Buildroot. This is a layered approach making it easy to customize without changing Buildroot at its core. Proprietary applications may use NetBox as NetBox use Buildroot, see the App-Demo project for an example of this.

Platforms

The NetBox project follows the Westermo product platform naming. This to be able to easily match what container image works on a Westermo device:

Architecture	Platform Code Name
powerpc	Coronet
arm	Dagger
aarch64	Envoy
x86_64	Zero

Flavor

In addition to various NetBox platforms there are two major flavors available. The current first-class citizen is apps, but it is also possible to build an entire operating system image, including Linux kernel and the same userland already available to apps. To select a pre-configured NetBox flavor for a given platform:

• netbox_app_$platform
• netbox_os_$platform

Building

First clone the repository, optionally check out the tagged release you want to use. The build system clones the submodule on the first build, but you can also run the command manually:

cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/westermo/netbox.git
cd netbox
git submodule update --init

Second, select your target _defconfig, see the configs/ directory, or use make list-defconfigs to see all Buildroot and NetBox configs available. We select the defconfig for Zero (x86-64) NetBox app flavor:

make netbox_app_zero_defconfig

Third, type make and fetch a cup of coffee because the first time you build it will take some time:

make

Done. See the output/images/ directory for the resulting SquasFS based root filesystem: netbox-$platform.img

Note: the included NetBox defconfigs use pre-built toolchains from the myRootFS project, built from crosstool-NG. See that project for details, including the .config needed to rebuild for your own build machine. Archives are available under Releases

Running

All NetBox os builds can be run in Qemu. Highly useful for quick turnarounds when developing and testing new features.

make run

The NetBox app builds can be run in LXC, or LXD, on your PC but this is not yet documented here. It is even possible to run non-native archs, like Arm64, on your PC using Linux "binfmt misc" support, in which case all binaries are run through qemu-aarch64. It both feels and really is a very weird thing. So it's not documented yet and we instead encourage all newbies to try out the Zero app builds in LXC first.

• https://github.com/myrootfs/myrootfs#lxd

Example

Here's an example run of a Zero OS build, with the added bonus of a persistent store for all configuration using an image file in your ~/.cache/:

make distclean
make netbox_os_zero_defconfig
make
QEMU_MNT=~/.cache/netbox-zero.img make run

Versioning

NetBox use the same versioning as Buildroot, with an appended -rN to denote the revision of Buildroot with Westermo extensions. E.g., the first release is 2020.02-r1.

Releasing

To trigger release builds, the RELEASE= variable must be set from the command line, but you must also have tagged the repository.

1. Tag the repository: $BR2_VERSION-rN
2. Set the environment variable RELEASE=$BR2_VERSION-rN and run make