Chapter 21. Debugging Buildroot

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It is possible to instrument the steps Buildroot does when building packages. Define the variable BR2_INSTRUMENTATION_SCRIPTS to contain the path of one or more scripts (or other executables), in a space-separated list, you want called before and after each step. The scripts are called in sequence, with three parameters:

start or end to denote the start (resp. the end) of a step;
the name of the step about to be started, or which just ended;
the name of the package.

For example :

make BR2_INSTRUMENTATION_SCRIPTS="/path/to/my/script1 /path/to/my/script2"

The list of steps is:

extract
patch
configure
build
install-host, when a host-package is installed in $(HOST_DIR)
install-target, when a target-package is installed in $(TARGET_DIR)
install-staging, when a target-package is installed in $(STAGING_DIR)
install-image, when a target-package installs files in $(BINARIES_DIR)

The script has access to the following variables:

BR2_CONFIG: the path to the Buildroot .config file
HOST_DIR, STAGING_DIR, TARGET_DIR: see Section 18.6.2, “generic-package reference”
BUILD_DIR: the directory where packages are extracted and built
BINARIES_DIR: the place where all binary files (aka images) are stored
BASE_DIR: the base output directory
PARALLEL_JOBS: the number of jobs to use when running parallel processes.