Re: [gentoo-embedded] Wind River Linux experience

[Ed W]

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