Building (Advanced)

Build-System Options

The following options can be used in LE 10.x+ to customise the build experience:

Name	Values	Default	Description
THREADCOUNT	#,#%	100%	Maximum number of packages to build concurrently. On an 8-core system, 50% would build up to 4 packages at a time.
ONELOG	yes,no	no	If yes, packages will not create individual logs in ${THREAD_CONTROL}/logs. If THREADCOUNT is 1 the default becomes ONELOG=yes in which case use ONELOG=no to ensure individual logs are created for each package.
LOGCOMBINE	always,never,fail	always	Determine under what circumstances package logs are written to stdout. Using never and fail can slightly reduce IO.
MTBOOKENDS	yes,no	yes	Adds <<< and >>> tags to the combined log output (to facilitate searching).
DISABLE_COLORS	yes,no	no	Control whether build system output is colored or not.
MTCOLORS	always,never,auto	auto	If DISABLE_COLORS=yes this option controls how scripts/pkgbuilder.py progress and status information is colored. auto will disable colors when output is being redirected to a file (ie. not a terminal).
MTVERBOSE	yes,no	no	Output additional job state information to stderr during the build.
MTPROGRESS	yes,no	no	Output real-time load, memory and in-progress job information to stderr at 1-second intervals
MTDEBUG	yes,no	no	Output detailed debug information to ${THREAD_CONTROL}/debug.log
MTADDONBUILD	yes,no	no	If no, the build will end after the first failure. When building add-ons, we typically ignore individual package failures and continue building until all packages have been built (or failed).
MTIMMEDIATE	yes,no	no	When MTADDONBUILD=no and a package fails, the build can finish after all currently building packages have completed, or it can terminate those packages immediately. Allowing packages that are currently building to finish building can save time when restarting the build.
MTINTERVAL	#	60	System load information is captured at regular intervals in ${THREAD_CONTROL}/loadstats.
AUTOREMOVE	yes,no	no	Remove source code directories during the build once the source code directory is not required.

Persistent Options

Options can be specified on the command line, or added to persistent "options" files located under the root folder of the buildsystem, e.g. ~/LibreELEC.tv/.libreelec/options or the users home folder, e.g. ~/.libreelec/options - if both files exist, home folder options trump root folder options. The following gives a fairly clean and comprehensive output while still allowing command-line overrides:

LOGCOMBINE=${LOGCOMBINE:-never}
MTPROGRESS=${MTPROGRESS:-yes}
MTIMMEDIATE=${MTIMMEDIATE:-no}

Builder Name and Version

If you are building and sharing images via the LibreELEC forums it is good to include a custom "builder" name with your images. This allows the team to count the number of active installs using your images (we can share this info on request). Builder name also populates into /etc/os-release and logfiles, which helps forum staff supporting users differentiate between official releases and community created images. It is also possible to set custom versioning. e.g.

PROJECT=Generic ARCH=x86_64 BUILDER_NAME=yourname BUILDER_VERSION=123 make image

It is also possible to set persistent BUILDER_NAME and BUILDER_VERSION in "options" files.

Debug Images

The build-system automatically strips debug symbols from most packages. To disable this and include debug symbols and common debugging packages in the image, enable DEBUG, e.g.

PROJECT=Generic ARCH=x86_64 DEBUG=yes make image

To also include valgrind:

PROJECT=Generic ARCH=x86_64 DEBUG=yes VALGRIND=yes make image

Note: The resulting image will be considerably larger than normal. The default boot partition is 512MB, but debug images may exceed this and require a 1GB partition.

Private Sources

To build using package source tarballs from a private GitHub repository the package.mk must be modified to use token authentication else wget requests made by the buildsystem are anonymous and package downloads will fail.

First obtain a personal access token from https://github.com/settings/tokens and add the token to the file .libreelec/options in the root folder of the buildsystem as shown below:

TOKEN="ghp_aZBfIlA07M32p0Cy7i5hlaSzeZMZO40GuL7b"

Now modify the package.mk for the package to include additional authentication data. In the example below we are downloading an archive using a githash for PKG_VERSION and with the PKG_SHA256 check disabled. The WGET_OPT line has been added, and the format of the URL used in PKG_URL has been tweaked to include ${TOKEN}:@ between URI and domain:

PKG_VERSION="501631d21b37c858f32a0f0d10237b14d1cd2224"                                
PKG_SHA256=""                                                                         
WGET_OPT="--auth-no-challenge --header='Accept:application/octet-stream'"             
PKG_URL="https://${TOKEN}:@github.com/LibreELEC/kernel/archive/${PKG_VERSION}.tar.gz"
PKG_SOURCE_NAME="linux-${LINUX}-${PKG_VERSION}.tar.gz"

Should you need to use more than one token, create TOKEN2 and TOKEN3 etc. in the options file and reference them as variables in the package.mk files that require them.