BISDN Linux build system

This repository holds files for building the BISDN Linux network operating system.

Pre-built release images can be downloaded from the BISDN Linux images page. Nightly builds are also available.

If you want to build your own BISDN Linux images, you can use the files in this repo and the kas automation tool. The only file that you will need is the kas configuration file bisdn-linux.yaml. All other files in this repo are documentation or for the benefit of our CI/CD and release management systems.

The remainder of this document provides a quick guide on how to build a BISDN Linux image. For further customization, build optimization, and troubleshooting, please refer to BUILDING_DETAILS.md.

Supported switches

A list of supported switches can be found at BISDN Linux images.

Build requirements

Hardware requirements

We recommend a build host with 32 CPU cores, 32 GiB RAM and 150 GiB free disk space for building a full image. You may get away with less, but you risk running into out-of-memory errors, a full disk, or a slow build.

Software requirements

Our build system uses kas to fetch the source repositories and to configure the build. While it is possible to run kas directly on your build host, we recommend using kas-container because it provides a reproducible build environment.

Your build host should be running Linux and have the following software components installed:

• kas. Some Linux distributions offer their own kas package, but they may be too old to work with our kas files. We recommend installing kas as a Python package (using pip, pipx, or a similar tool).

• a container management tool. For the rest of this document, we will assume you have docker installed, but podman should work as well.

Time and disk space

Expect the build process to take a bit over an hour with 32 CPU cores and 32 GiB RAM. Adding additional CPU cores speeds up the build time significantly.

Subsequent builds are much faster (taking less than 10 minutes with a warm build cache) because source repos (kept in the sources directory) are not downloaded again and (more importantly) a number of intermediate build artifacts are cached in the build directory.

A single build requires about 100 GiB of disk space. The cache directories in build directory tend to grow slowly when building new versions.

Building a BISDN Linux image

BISDN Linux supports two different architectures: Broadcom XGS iProc (ARM), and Intel x86-64.

To select the target machine for BISDN Linux, pass the appropriate name via theKAS_MACHINE environment variable:

• generic-armel-iproc for devices based on Broadcom XGS iProc (Accton AS4610 series)
• generic-x86-64 for devices with an Intel x86 host CPU (all other supported devices)

To build the image from the latest sources, clone this repo and run the following command in its root directory, e.g.:

KAS_MACHINE=generic-x86-64 kas-container build bisdn-linux.yaml

After the build process has finished, your image will be in build/tmp/deploy/images/<KAS_MACHINE>/. A symlink named onie-bisdn-full-<KAS_MACHINE>.bin will point to the actual image file named onie-bisdn-full-<KAS_MACHINE>-<timestamp>.bin.

Installing a BISDN Linux image

Please refer to our BISDN Linux docs on how to install the resulting image.