The x86-rt machine provides a platform for generic x86-64 hardware using a real time kernel.

Follow the setup guide to set up the build environment and set MACHINE = „x86-rt“ in local.conf.

Prebuilt images can be downloaded here .

Currently there are only instructions for booting from a USB stick, however, these instructions should serve as a good point of reference for installing on other media (such as SSD's or hard disks).

Materials needed:

• USB Stick
• image.wic file (prebuilt or custom)
• x86 based PC with the ability to boot from USB (any reasonably modern PC should be able to do this)

Plug in the USB Stick and identify the corresponding block device (/dev/sdX) using lsblk.

Example output for lsblk:

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0   2.7T  0 disk 
└─sda1        8:1    0   2.7T  0 part /mnt/hdd
sdb           8:16   1   3.8G  0 disk 
├─sdb1        8:17   1   681M  0 part 
└─sdb2        8:18   1    56M  0 part 
sdf           8:80   0   500G  0 disk 
sdg           8:96   0   100G  0 disk 
├─sdg1        8:97   0   100M  0 part 
└─sdg2        8:98   0  99.9G  0 part 
nvme1n1     259:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─nvme1n1p1 259:2    0   512M  0 part 
├─nvme1n1p2 259:3    0 457.3G  0 part 
└─nvme1n1p3 259:4    0     8G  0 part 
nvme0n1     259:1    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:5    0   300M  0 part /efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:6    0 931.2G  0 part /

A quick guide to reading the output: lsblk uses a tree to show devices and their partitions. For example sda1 is the first partition on sda and nvme1n1p1 is the first partition of nvme1n1.

sdX where X is a small letter starting from a usually represents a SATA or USB drive, names starting with nvme represent NVME SSDs and SD cards usually start with mmcblk. These names represent the device as found in /dev, so sda is found under /dev/sda.

The easiest way to identify the right block device is usually it's size. In the example output above, we are looking for a 4GB USB Stick. We can infer that the USB Stick is /dev/sdb, since it is the only device with roughly the right size (3.8GB). Note that the size shown in lsblk may differ slightly from the nominal size of the USB Stick due to partitioning.

If there are multiple devices of the same size as the USB stick it may be necessary to run lsblk before and after plugging in the USB stick and checking which device only appears in the second output.

: Writing the image to the USB Stick will erase all content!

: Make absolutely sure you have identified the correct device! dd will not hesitate to override your OS drive if you tell it to!

Use the following command to write the image to the USB stick modifying /path/to/image.wic and /dev/sdX accordingly.

sudo dd if=/path/to/image.wic of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress
sudo eject /dev/sdX

The USB stick can now be used to boot from USB. Note that the BIOS/UEFI setting to achieve this are hardware specific.