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Tomasz Chmielewski wrote: |
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> I was wondering if gentoo-mips is a right distribution/tool for me. |
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> |
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> Here's the summary what I have and what I want to achieve. |
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> |
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> I am interested in porting apps for wrt54 and similar hardware (they |
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> have Broadcom CPUs). When I connect a 2 GB usb-stick to such a device |
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> (i.e., to ASUS WL-500g Deluxe or to any other device listed on |
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> http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware), a small router could turn into |
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> a really useful, rock-stable (no moving parts like hard-disk, fan etc.), |
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> cheap, small, quiet, multi-purpose device (domain controller, print |
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> server, web server etc.). |
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A good idea...which is already facilitated by openwrt. |
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> As compiling software on these devices directly isn't really a good |
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> idea, at first I thought I'd just cross-compile the software. |
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> However, very often, cross-compiling is not that easy (sometimes |
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> involves lots of patching, which in my case turned out to be duplicating |
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> someone's job). |
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Duplicating...you mean like the work openwrt has already done? |
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> So I searched the web a bit, and came to a conclusion: |
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> |
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> I have to run gentoo-mips in qemu on my x86 hardware, compile/port apps |
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> there, strip the binaries, and move them to these tiny routers. |
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> |
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> Is my thinking correct? |
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Theoretically, our mipsel uclibc stages would let you do that, except |
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that apparently qemu for mips still has problems with userland programs. |
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That and I don't think qemu is particularly fast. |
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> Will such compiled software compiled on gentoo-mips run on |
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> Broadcom-based routers? |
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If you use the mipsel uclibc stages, and optimize for -march=mips32, sure. |
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> Or maybe I just should give up this idea, as it's totally wrong from the |
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> beginning? |
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This is really the smartest thing you have said thus far. Gentoo is |
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really not set up to run on these devices. It is far too heavy to |
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directly run on them (they don't have enough RAM, and typically not |
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enough disk space), and cross-compiling everything is a pain in the ass. |
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Folks behind distros like openwrt have already done a lot of hard work |
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porting apps and making them compile inside of their buildroot environment. |
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> I could check it myself, but as I failed to run the gentoo-mips livecd |
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> in quemu, I'd like to know if I'm doing something reasonable before I |
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> invest some time in running gentoo-mips on qemu. |
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The gentoo-mips livecd is definitely not what you want. The userland on |
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the cd and included kernels are only for big endian SGI hardware. It |
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has no chance of working on anything else. If I recall, qemu emulates a |
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little endian, MIPS 4kc cpu. |
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-Steve |
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-- |
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