Skip the deployment stage (generating root file system image)

Question

Is it possible to execute buildroot and have it skip the deployment stage?

In LTIB you simply add --no-deploy.

It's the most expensive step in building and 99 out of 100 times, I'm not interested in the final image because I'm using NFS to mount the target directory during development.

Answer 1

You could remove all the BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_FOO variables from the .config

Answer 2

If you're doing NFS mount, then you have to create at least a tarball image. Using output/target as your NFS mountpoint is entirely incorrect: the permissions/owernship are not correct, and device files are not present in output/target. Only the images generated by Buildroot have those things correct.

We even committed today a Buildroot change that strongly warns users not to use output/target as their root filesystem: http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=9226a9907c4eb0fffab777f50e88b74aa14d1737