Building with Multipass

In order to build an Armbian image from scratch, whether for development purposes or to apply user customizations on top of a base image, a build environment is required. Per the Armbian documentation, Ubuntu 22.04 is the officially supported build platform.

Multipass that is designed for quick and painless provisioning of Ubuntu VMs.

Creating a VM and preparing for build

Multipass is available for macOS, Windows and Linux platforms.

Once you have multipass installed, a Jammy (22.04) instance with 4 CPUs, 4GB of RAM and 25GB of space available can be provisioned with a single command:

multipass launch --cpus 4 --disk 25G --mem 4G --name jammy

Clone the build repo

You can run commands direct on the instance to clone the build repo:

multipass exec jammy -- bash -c "git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/armbian/build" 

Use an instance

Then you can get a shell to the instance and run the build as needed:

C:\> multipass shell armbian
Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64)
Last login: Tue Jan 30 12:23:08 2024 from 172.22.111.1
# Let's get building!  
ubuntu@armbian:~$ cd build
ubuntu@armbian:~/build$ ./compile.sh BOARD=orangepizero ... etc

Share data with an instance

The recommended way to share data between your host and an instance with Multipass is the command:mount

multipass mount /my/dir jammy
multipass info jammy

Mounts: /my/dir => /my/dir

From this point on will be available inside the instance./my/dir