Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage in Embedded Systems?

[Ned Ludd]

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 23:33, Chris White wrote:
> All,
>
>     Maybe I've just not seen this, but what sort of footprint does
> portage leave on embedded systems with low cpu/ram?

I think what your asking about here is what we are starting to coin as a
gentoo-lite system. A lot of people are gaining an interest in this.
Running gentoo with portage on crappy old hardware. Or they just want
the performance boast and lower memory usage. For a system like this I'd
think you would want atleast a P75 with atleast 32M of of ram. 
Portage is not so big. But python itself is a beast.

In one experiment I've managed to get pythons runtime down to about 2
Megs of HD space. And in another experiment with the portage tree itself
I managed to get it down to 14 Megs with the use of squashfs and
excluding a few things from the tree which I know are not needed to do
emerge system. But a full portage-rsync tree compressed was about 17
Megs

Now if we are talking embedded systems in the way I like to think of
them (ie firmware) then the min requirements are about 4M of Ram and 3M
of flash space using a semi default setup, give or take depending on the
device your building for.

> I ask this mainly
> because it's a Good Thing To Know (tm) considering the last LWE
> conference was full of people asking about using Gentoo for embedded
> devices.
portage needs work and a fair bit of it.
Other than myself and mike more people need to propose ideas to the
portage team to make things more flexible.

>  Something like higher end Palms may be able to dish it out,
> but what happens when you get to lower end palms or even cell phones?

What about them?
Most cell phones are ARM based.
Mike Frysinger is currently working on generic uclibc arm little endian
stages. When he has those complete (and most of the bugs worked out)
I'll start on generic uclibc arm big endian stages. When I have those
complete and I'm happy with it I'm going to ship the device off to OSU
so we can continue to support the arch from a (le||be) perspective. The
unit I will be developing with is a nslu2 that was a donation to the
gentoo embedded project thanks to the guys over at the nslu2-linux
project (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/) who had a fund raiser in order to
get me one. They ended up getting 9x the amount in donations needed to
send me a unit and were able to send them to a number of other embedded
projects.

Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks to our embedded support right
now. 
1) Lack of skilled (wo)manpower.
2) Lack of proper cross-toolchain handling by portage. So everything is
considered native-* vs cross-* (this means you must use the same host
arch as your target arch) or use a binfmt_elf kernel module to emulate
your target arch.
3) package management for embedded devices. (no all devices are
read-only)
- ipkg format seems ideal here but I/we have not enough input from the
community to tell what will be ideal in the long run.

If anybody that has a decent level of cross compiling experience and
thinks that they would be interested in gentoo supporting better cross-*
support please contact me. (seriously motivated people only)

>
> Thanks ahead of time for any/all comments and hold on (*ChrisWhite
> prepares fireproof suit)... and flames.

hrmm flames.. none right now but as soon as I can think of something or
get a blowtorch I'll be sure to direct it your way.

-- 
Ned Ludd <solar@g.o>
Gentoo (hardened,security,infrastructure,embedded,toolchain) Developer