1 |
Oh yeah one more sexy thing that we are rather proud of. |
2 |
Our stage(3) |
3 |
http://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/x86/embedded/stages/ |
4 |
stage3-x86-uclibc-20040927.tar.bz2 27-Sep-2004 23:07 34M |
5 |
|
6 |
Standard stage(3) |
7 |
http://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/x86/2004.2/stages/x86/ |
8 |
stage3-x86-2004.2.tar.bz2 22-Jul-2004 08:41 89M |
9 |
|
10 |
On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 19:09, Ned Ludd wrote: |
11 |
> On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 23:33, Chris White wrote: |
12 |
> > All, |
13 |
> > |
14 |
> > Maybe I've just not seen this, but what sort of footprint does |
15 |
> > portage leave on embedded systems with low cpu/ram? |
16 |
> |
17 |
> I think what your asking about here is what we are starting to coin as a |
18 |
> gentoo-lite system. A lot of people are gaining an interest in this. |
19 |
> Running gentoo with portage on crappy old hardware. Or they just want |
20 |
> the performance boast and lower memory usage. For a system like this I'd |
21 |
> think you would want atleast a P75 with atleast 32M of of ram. |
22 |
> Portage is not so big. But python itself is a beast. |
23 |
> |
24 |
> In one experiment I've managed to get pythons runtime down to about 2 |
25 |
> Megs of HD space. And in another experiment with the portage tree itself |
26 |
> I managed to get it down to 14 Megs with the use of squashfs and |
27 |
> excluding a few things from the tree which I know are not needed to do |
28 |
> emerge system. But a full portage-rsync tree compressed was about 17 |
29 |
> Megs |
30 |
> |
31 |
> Now if we are talking embedded systems in the way I like to think of |
32 |
> them (ie firmware) then the min requirements are about 4M of Ram and 3M |
33 |
> of flash space using a semi default setup, give or take depending on the |
34 |
> device your building for. |
35 |
> |
36 |
> > I ask this mainly |
37 |
> > because it's a Good Thing To Know (tm) considering the last LWE |
38 |
> > conference was full of people asking about using Gentoo for embedded |
39 |
> > devices. |
40 |
> portage needs work and a fair bit of it. |
41 |
> Other than myself and mike more people need to propose ideas to the |
42 |
> portage team to make things more flexible. |
43 |
> |
44 |
> > Something like higher end Palms may be able to dish it out, |
45 |
> > but what happens when you get to lower end palms or even cell phones? |
46 |
> |
47 |
> What about them? |
48 |
> Most cell phones are ARM based. |
49 |
> Mike Frysinger is currently working on generic uclibc arm little endian |
50 |
> stages. When he has those complete (and most of the bugs worked out) |
51 |
> I'll start on generic uclibc arm big endian stages. When I have those |
52 |
> complete and I'm happy with it I'm going to ship the device off to OSU |
53 |
> so we can continue to support the arch from a (le||be) perspective. The |
54 |
> unit I will be developing with is a nslu2 that was a donation to the |
55 |
> gentoo embedded project thanks to the guys over at the nslu2-linux |
56 |
> project (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/) who had a fund raiser in order to |
57 |
> get me one. They ended up getting 9x the amount in donations needed to |
58 |
> send me a unit and were able to send them to a number of other embedded |
59 |
> projects. |
60 |
> |
61 |
> Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks to our embedded support right |
62 |
> now. |
63 |
> 1) Lack of skilled (wo)manpower. |
64 |
> 2) Lack of proper cross-toolchain handling by portage. So everything is |
65 |
> considered native-* vs cross-* (this means you must use the same host |
66 |
> arch as your target arch) or use a binfmt_elf kernel module to emulate |
67 |
> your target arch. |
68 |
> 3) package management for embedded devices. (no all devices are |
69 |
> read-only) |
70 |
> - ipkg format seems ideal here but I/we have not enough input from the |
71 |
> community to tell what will be ideal in the long run. |
72 |
> |
73 |
> If anybody that has a decent level of cross compiling experience and |
74 |
> thinks that they would be interested in gentoo supporting better cross-* |
75 |
> support please contact me. (seriously motivated people only) |
76 |
> |
77 |
> > |
78 |
> > Thanks ahead of time for any/all comments and hold on (*ChrisWhite |
79 |
> > prepares fireproof suit)... and flames. |
80 |
> |
81 |
> hrmm flames.. none right now but as soon as I can think of something or |
82 |
> get a blowtorch I'll be sure to direct it your way. |
83 |
-- |
84 |
Ned Ludd <solar@g.o> |
85 |
Gentoo (hardened,security,infrastructure,embedded,toolchain) Developer |