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

[Nick Rout]

On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:09:59 -0400
Ned Ludd <solar@g.o> wrote:

> 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.

having taken delivery of a zaurus sl-5500 yeterday this took my eye:

http://www.opensistemas.com/Gentoo_for_Zaurus.715.0.html

From the screenshots and other stuff i read there they seems to be cross
compiling to binary packages on a x86, then installing on the zaurus,
with the possibilty of turning the .tbz2 into a zaurus style .ipk
package.

Presumably the portage tree is not needed on the zaurus, i am not sure
and also not game enough to flash mine yet :)

mind you a zaurus is probably more development oriented than the average
ARM based cellphone.


>
> 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

-- 
Nick Rout <nick@×××××××.nz>


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