On last development version 2015.05 rc1 of Buildroot, when external toolchain Linaro 2014.09 is selected, Systemd cannot be choosed as init system. From ./toolchain/toolchain-external/Config.in for BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_LINARO_ARM and BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_LINARO_ARMEB BR2_TOOLCHAIN_HEADERS_AT_LEAST_3_1 is selected But in ./system/Config.in for BR2_INIT_SYSTEMD you need at least BR2_TOOLCHAIN_HEADERS_AT_LEAST_3_10 From Linaro website Linaro 2014.09 is build against 3.17 linux kernel : https://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1409/Release
Where do you see that the 2014.09 toolchain is built against 3.17? I don't see that anywhere on that page (I do see they have released a 3.17-based kernel, but that doesn't mean the toolchain is built against it. And checking linux/version.h from the toolchain correctly shows that it was built against 3.1.1: cat output/staging/usr/include/linux/version.h #define LINUX_VERSION_CODE 196865 #define KERNEL_VERSION(a,b,c) (((a) << 16) + ((b) << 8) + (c)) printf '0x%x\n' 196865 0x30101