2.5. Bootstrap the RTEMS Sources — RTEMS User Manual 5.4-rc2 (21st August 2026) documentation

# 2.5. Bootstrap the RTEMS Sources

You installed the tool suite in your installation prefix and made ready the source for two RTEMS source packages in the previous sections. We installed the tool suite in `$HOME/quick-start/rtems/5` and unpacked the RSB source in `$HOME/quick-start/src`.

You only need to bootstrap the RTEMS sources if you have used Git to get the sources. If you use source archives of a released RTEMS version you can skip this section and move to Build a Board Support Package (BSP).

Before you can build a Board Support Package (BSP) for your target hardware from Git cloned RTEMS sources, you have to bootstrap the build system in the RTEMS sources. This is only necessary if you use a Git repository clone of the RTEMS sources. You have to do this after a fresh repository clone and sometimes after build system file updates (e.g. after a `git pull`). If you are not a build system expert, then do the bootstrap after each update of build system files. This is a bit annoying, but improving the build system is a complex and time consuming undertaking. Feel free to help the RTEMS Project to improve it. For the bootstrap it is important that the right version of Autotools (`autoconf` and `automake`) are in your `$PATH`. The right version of Autotools is shipped with the RTEMS tool suite you already installed. Set the path to the tool suite installed under your selected prefix:

    export PATH=$HOME/quick-start/rtems/5/bin:"$PATH"

Change into the RTEMS source tree to bootstrap the build system:

    cd $HOME/quick-start/src/rtems
    ./rtems-bootstrap

This command should output something like this (omitted lines are denoted by `...`):

    RTEMS Bootstrap, 1.0
      1/122: autoreconf: configure.ac
      2/122: autoreconf: testsuites/configure.ac
      3/122: autoreconf: testsuites/fstests/configure.ac
      4/122: autoreconf: testsuites/smptests/configure.ac
      5/122: autoreconf: testsuites/psxtests/configure.ac
      6/122: autoreconf: testsuites/mptests/configure.ac
    ...
    121/122: autoreconf: c/src/lib/libbsp/lm32/milkymist/configure.ac
    122/122: autoreconf: c/src/make/configure.ac
    Bootstrap time: 0:00:46.404643