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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