Re: [gentoo-embedded] Wind River Linux experience

[Kfir Lavi]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Ed W <lists@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> On 23/03/2011 14:54, Kfir Lavi wrote:
>> Wow James thanks a lot for your insight.
>> It seems that WR is a giant BSP house, which is good for really preliminary
>> explorations of new hardware. I can see their benefit for an
>> organization that
>> don't really know what is Linux.
>> The company I work with have a lot of projects. Most of them relay on a
>> known
>> and debugged hardware. I'm not intending to change all of their working
>> way,
>> but for a start I'm trying to push Gentoo in the project I'm working on,
>
> I think the most important question for you is the "best tools for the
> job".  I can't answer that, but just some advocacy for gentoo as an
> embedded tool, look back at the thread "Some good words for Gentoo
> Embedded"?
>
> I'm only building a small x86 board and I haven't mastered Catalyst so
> I'm building my root using what is popularly known as "Tiny Gentoo".
> However, the construction is incredibly simple and roughly my build is a
> script which wraps something like:
>
> ROOT=/builds/my-build emerge baselayout uclibc busybox openresolv\
>  dhcpcd dropbear your_other_stuff
>
> And pretty much that's it, you have a working, bootable, build.  Give or
> take fixing a bunch of bugs in ebuilds which aren't tested on your
> architecture, this means you now have the entire portage library at your
> disposal for building your embedded system, and that's likely worth a lot?
>
> I think you end up deviating from standard portage quite a bit for
> embedded and surely lots of folks here have great experience that we
> don't seem to share much?  But I find for example I need a lot of
> customised /etc/ scripts, or tweaks to init.d files, etc.  It's tricky
> to decide if these should be overlays added at the end, or to patch the
> ebuild to install them pre-customised.  I use a bit of a blend and
> recently I have started trying to use /etc/portage/patches/cat/pkg
> (badly documented) as a way to hook into ebuilds without having to patch
> every version, forever, and lightly tweak the install.
>
>
> I think "tools" are very personal and you can make a case for the tools
> which fit your needs.  However, I guess the point here is only that
> Gentoo is a very nice tool for embedded and may meet the requirements of
> many folks have, but who otherwise pass it over for more well known
> alternatives.
>
> Good luck and if you do use Gentoo, please share something on what you
> learn?
>
> Ed W
>
>

Oh,
I find it very hard to share or document what I'm doing. I really want
to do it,
and my gentoo blog really needs some new content, but I just don't have time.
I'm working everyday until 22:00 and my 7months son also needs me, so I really
try to be everywhere.
I'm pushing Gentoo, because it can be tailored automatically for a lot
of projects.
From small devices to a cluster. The initial go is very hard with
steep curve, but
what I aim for is the ease of use and replication when problem strike or when
moving to new project.
As for Catalyst, I'll try to post my conclusion about this tool for our use.

I'll try to document more what I'm doing.
Regards,
Kfir