Buildroot External Tree for Ingenic X2000

This repository is a Buildroot external tree for the Ingenic Halley5 development board. Halley5 is based on the Ingenic X2000 MIPS SoC and includes RGMII Ethernet and an AP6256 SDIO Wi-Fi module.

The halley5_defconfig configuration builds:

• Linux 6.6.151 with the included Ingenic and Halley5 patch series
• a compressed Linux kernel uImage
• an ext2 root filesystem
• mainline U-Boot 2026.04, freshly ported to the X2000 (see below)
• Ethernet userspace configured for DHCP
• AP6256 firmware, iw, and wpa_supplicant
• USB and QMI modem support

U-Boot

The bootloader is mainline U-Boot (v2026.04, from ftp.denx.de), not the vendor's heavily-modified U-Boot. The X2000 support is added as a small, self-contained patch series on top of the pristine upstream tree, and the upstream code is otherwise untouched.

The patch series:

• 0001 .. 0007 under board/ingenic/halley5/patches/uboot/
• adds the arch/mips/mach-ingenic/ SoC port (SPL, CGU clocks, PLL, LPDDR3)
• adds the board/ingenic/halley5/ board
• adds the DM MMC/SDHCI and GMAC ethernet drivers
• builds with the in-tree halley5_mmc_defconfig

The boot ROM expects a specific on-card layout, so the build additionally assembles u-boot-with-spl-mbr-gpt.bin from the SPL, U-Boot, and the board's MBR/GPT and boot-params blobs via tools/ingenic-mkimage.py.

See board/ingenic/halley5/README in the U-Boot tree for the full port documentation.

Build

The external tree targets Buildroot 2026.05.1.

git clone https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot
git clone https://github.com/lone0/buildroot-external-x2000.git

cd buildroot
make BR2_EXTERNAL=../buildroot-external-x2000 halley5_defconfig
make -j"$(nproc)"

Buildroot records the external-tree path in the output directory, so BR2_EXTERNAL does not need to be repeated for later make commands.

The main build artifacts are:

• output/images/uImage
• output/images/rootfs.ext2
• output/images/u-boot-with-spl-mbr-gpt.bin (bootable U-Boot image)

The kernel patches are maintained under board/ingenic/halley5/patches/linux/, and the U-Boot patches under board/ingenic/halley5/patches/uboot/.