The bootstrap linux looks easy, but do I need to do something special
to build it for MIPS? I still build it from my external computer, right?
On Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:25:04 -0600, Alan Post wrote:
On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:39:09AM -0500, [email protected]
wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:24:32 -0600, Alan Post wrote:
>On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 11:31:12PM -0500, [email protected]
>wrote:
>>I am wondering what you all think about how far I, or any of us,
for
>>that matter, should go with hacking on the Ben. For one, Qi
adapted
>>OpenWRT rather than made a new distribution from (near) scratch.
Was
>>this due to time constraints, or something else? Would it be worth
>>it for someone to learn the MIPS architecture sufficiently well to
>>make a Ben Tailored OS? Or, since the new Nanonote may or may not
>>have a similar chip, is it better to stay "on the surface" as it
>>were and not get too involved in low-level stuff? Maybe the
>>experience alone of deep MIPS knowledge will be worth it even if
we
>>move to another chip in the future? If one does not go deeper than
>>the kernel and other basic utils, I suppose "from scratch" would
>>mean getting a custom kernel and utils, tuning them, then building
>>from there, right? I think in general, x86 GNU/Linux is assumed
to
>>be as optimized as it could be, but I'm not sure about other
>>architectures like ARM, MIPS, etc. Since someone has already done
>>the work, perhaps it is not good to try and re-do it...?
>>
>
>If you'd like to stay with Linux, but are interested in moving off
>of OpenWRT, you might find one of these projects interesting for
>your effort:
>
> https://github.com/pikhq/bootstrap-linux
> http://www.landley.net/aboriginal/
>
>Neither of these are "ready-to-go" for the Ben; the second isn't
>strictly a distribution. They are both an attempt to build the
>smallest *self-hosting* linux environment, and in that role make
>good bootstrapping tools.
>
>They're essentially one step above Linux From Scratch.
>
>-Alan
By 'self hosting' do you mean that in a network sense, or in the
sense that you can actually compile on them? That does sound
interesting although I wonder if there are any systems that can run
a full shell for the Ben (not busybox). Thanks for the interesting
links.
I mean self-hosting in the sense that one could recompile the image
for the Ben on the Ben. With the caveat that with 32MB of memory,
some pieces of this process may well not compile due to memory
constraint. It would certainly require telling gcc that it has a
memory limit. IIRC gcc starts with a pretty generous assumption
of how much memory it has to work with.
I'm not sure what self-hosting in a network sense is. What would
that be?!
-Alan
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