This codelab series focuses on the Fuchsia emulator (FEMU) as the target device, which is built and distributed with the source tree and runs on your development machine. However, you can also build Fuchsia for supported hardware platforms, such as an Intel NUC.
This section describes some specifics related to working with Fuchsia on physical devices.
Fuchsia defines support for hardware devices by the board name used to
configure the build. This includes any hardware-specific packages such as
drivers. Recall the fx set command used previously:
fx set workstation_eng.qemu-x64
In this example, qemu-x64 is the board name for FEMU. To build the same
product for the Intel NUC, you can modify the set command to use the
x64 board.
Note: To determine the Fuchsia board name for your supported hardware, see the device documentation.
fx set workstation_eng.x64
Running fx build will now generate an image for the target device.
Before flashing the operating system, a supported device must have a Fuchsia-compatible bootloader installed. This process is known as bootstrapping the device. Many devices have a compatible bootloader installed from the factory, others may require manufacturer-specific tools to update the bootloader to a compatible version. See the device documentation for more details regarding your specific device.
Most Fuchsia-compatible devices use a bootloader that supports the Fastboot protocol.The process of loading the operating system onto the device is known as
flashing. With a device in bootloader mode connected to your workstation,
you can use the flash command to flash Fuchsia onto the device.
fx flash
For devices that have already been flashed, you can reboot them from Fuchsia
into bootloader mode if you need to flash them again using ffx:
ffx target reboot --bootloader
You can discover and interact with Fuchsia devices from a development machine connected over USB or a local IPv6 network. Fuchsia enables automatic device discovery using DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) over multicast DNS (mDNS) and the Overnet mesh protocol.
Host tools such as ffx discover advertising devices and enable host-target
interaction with both physical devices and FEMU.
ffx target list
NAME SERIAL TYPE STATE ADDRS/IP RCS
fuchsia-5254-0063-5e7a <unknown> . Product [fe80::c357:53e7:aedf:ed95%qemu] Y
If a target device does not advertise discovery packets or ffx is unable to
detect them, you can manage those targets manually using the add and remove
commands:
ffx target add {{ "<var>" }}device-ip{{ "</var>" }}:{{ "<var>" }}device-port{{ "</var>" }}
ffx target remove {{ "<var>" }}device-ip{{ "</var>" }}:{{ "<var>" }}device-port{{ "</var>" }}
Once a device is tracked in the target list, ffx interacts with the Remove
Control Service (RCS) on the target to enable you to send additional commands.
![Diagram showing how "ffx" is a developer tool that communicates with the Remote Control Service (RCS) on the Fuchsia Device.] (/get-started/images/build/ffx-rcs.png){: width="591"}
Note: For a complete list of the developer commands supported by ffx, see
the ffx reference.
Congratulations! You've successfully customized and built Fuchsia from source, and have a better understanding for where the key system components live in the source tree.
In the next module, you'll learn more about building Fuchsia's fundamental unit of software: