Common instructions

Common EDK II Build Instructions for Linux

  Note: New build instructions are available. It is recommended to start with the new instructions if learning how to
        build edk2 for the first time. This page is retained for reference.

New instructions: Build Instructions

These instructions assume you have installed Linux packages required for an EDK II build environment, including git (example: 16.04/16.10). The following instructions are common to the majority of Linux environments.

Get the edk2 source tree using Git

bash$ mkdir ~/src
bash$ cd ~/src
bash$ git clone https://github.com/tianocore/edk2

Note: the 'git clone' command above pulls the latest code from edk2. If you want to work from a stable release, specify a release tag when cloning. Example:

bash$ git clone https://github.com/tianocore/edk2.git vUDK2017

Initialize submodules

bash$ git submodule update --init

Compile build tools

bash$ cd ~/src/edk2
bash$ make -C BaseTools
bash$ . edksetup.sh

When the above steps are done, you can work in the edk2 directory for code development.

Build the EDK II BaseTools

bash$ make -C edk2/BaseTools

Setup build shell environment

bash$ cd ~/src/edk2
bash$ export EDK_TOOLS_PATH=$HOME/src/edk2/BaseTools
bash$ . edksetup.sh BaseTools

Modify Conf Files

Running edksetup.sh populates the edk2/Conf directory with default configuration files. You will need to edit the Conf/target.txt file to set the build platform, target architecture, tool chain, and multi-threading options. The example below is based on building the MdeModulePkg using GCC5.

Set Build Target Information

For the Conf/target.txt file, find the following lines:

ACTIVE_PLATFORM       = Nt32Pkg/Nt32Pkg.dsc
TOOL_CHAIN_TAG        = MYTOOLS

And change the corresponding lines to match these:

ACTIVE_PLATFORM       = MdeModulePkg/MdeModulePkg.dsc
TOOL_CHAIN_TAG        = GCC5

Note: The gcc --version command can be used to find out your GCC version. Use the GCC45 toolchain for gcc 4.5.* and the GCC46 toolchain for gcc 4.6.*.

Note: for GCC5 please install the gcc-5 package. Example for Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install gcc-5

Locate the TARGET_ARCH setting:

TARGET_ARCH           = IA32

Change this reflect the build architecture for the final UEFI binary.

Example: X64, IA32 X64 (which will build both architectures).

Optional: enable multi-threaded build. The default value for MAX_CONCURRENT_THREAD_NUMBER is 1, which disables multi-threaded build. Change this value based on your system's multi-threading capabilities. The formula is '1 + (2 x processor threads)'.

Example: for an Intel Core i5 (two processor cores w/ hyperthreading), the value is 9.

Build Hello World! (and the rest of MdeModulePkg)

Now you should be able to simply run the build command to compile MdeModulePkg.

bash$ build

One result of the build is that you should have the HelloWorld UEFI application:

bash$ ls Build/MdeModule/DEBUG_*/*/HelloWorld.efi

Build OVMF

Once your build environment is set up you might be interested in building the OVMF platform which is included in the main EDK II source tree. Since OVMF builds a full system firmware image, this may be of interest to UEFI system firmware developers.