Hello
A day ago Uwe Kindler cried in ecos-patches (I and some one more asked
about in a past in discuss-list)
Uwe> If there would be a preconfigured VM linux image available
Uwe> on the eCos homapage with all tools installed and a working
Uwe> synthetic target I would immediatelly start testing ;O)
And I thought, Why we have not Just enough OS for eCos?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_enough_operating_system
I mean an installation which would let anyone (well, any one who is
experienced, familiar with Linux) to get JeOS for building tests for
eCos Linux target (and may be more?).
IMO, it would be great to start such an appliance here:
http://ecos.sourceware.org/contrib.html
I had success with building the images which were suitable even for
VMWare Player (It's free and Windows guys in the most use it, not KVM or
QEmu).
A cool thing was in that what I used the Ubuntu's ubuntu-vm-builder:
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/ubuntu-vm-builder.html
That is just a script which downloads, installs distro (JeOS) and at the
end creates a disk image. I don't know, may be Debian, OpenSuSE, CentOS
have the same tool.
Well, what would we put into such a JeCos box?
Note: I type: jeos, jecos. JeCos is not typo I kept this abbr in my mind
for some reason :-)
I think that would be build-essential, tcl, tcl-dev packages, eCos 3.0,
and i386-elf toolchain, ccache. Does we need X-server? IMO, we would not
install it. AFAIK, it's possible to run tests for synthetic under gdb
using -nw, -io args. If I wrong, tell me why. I know that 7-zipped image
(vmware appliance, vmware disk) could be just a few tens of Mb.
Well, why did I point on ubuntu-vm-builder? That's just a script. I knew
about it. Well, may be I did not discover America for you. Excuse then
the snippets the below. If you run script with default settings, e.g.,
ubuntu-vm-builder vmw6 hardy --mirror <yours>
You can get jeos.7z (jeos.vmx, root.vmdk) in ~45M. That will be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_JeOS
And when I used own settings, e.g.,
ubuntu-vm-builder vmw6 hardy \
--mirror http://ftp.byfly.by/ubuntu \
--domain local \
--hostname jeos \
--user user \
--pass password \
--mem 512 \
--swap 1024 \
--opt 4096 \
--addpkg unattended-upgrades \
--addpkg psmisc \
--addpkg acpid \
--addpkg openssh-server \
--addpkg build-essential \
--addpkg ccache \
--addpkg tcl8.4 \
--addpkg tcl8.4-dev \
--addpkg vim
I got 31M jecos.7z (jeos.vmx, root.vmdk). Then I needed just to click on
root.vmdk to run JeOS VM with VMWare Player under ... X. Then using ssh
connection, I could add any deb packages and eCos itself there. Well,
that was just a try.
Unfortunately (fortunately) I have not Windows installed. So, I cannot
say what you can click on root.vmdk under Vista (or 7) and you will run
Ubuntu JeOS. I could not test it. But, may be some one have both OS
installed and he will try it, and then he will share JeCos vmdk with
others.
Well, you can say, it's odd thing, let's they install Linux and get it
all then, if they want. What are advantages with JeCos? I thought: the
same kernel, the same toolchain, the same gdb, the same userspace, the
same Tcl, etc. And then you would say, Hey, download our image from here
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ and try to build that example. What
is disadvantage. It will be slow, but I used ccache, you know that is
very robust tool if you rebuild eCos again, again and again.
Excuse me if it looks like off-topic for this list and I did waste your
time. Then, I'm sorry. But, I hope this post would inspire some one to
build Just enough OS/eCos appliance.
All, Have a good weekend :-)
Regards,
Sergei
