I just thought I would post something here (i also listen on
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ts-7000).
I'm putting together a .tbz2 file that can serve as a gentoo chroot for
embedded development for these ARM boards. It comes with crossdev too,
but it's necessary to NFS mount the portage tree. I'm hoping to use this
build environment and develop a series of overlays (one for each
'client' requirement).
Is there anyone else here that uses those boards from www.embeddedarm.com ?
I've used crossdev to compile applications for this ARM board in the
past, without failures. However, their current runtime and build
environment is extremely limited. The 2.4.26-tsXX kernels that they use
have some pretty dodgey modules that some people have been struggling to
get into the main 2.6.18 kernel. I have yet to successfully run a 2.6
kernel on one of these boards, although other list-members have said
that their kernels are running quite cleanly.
The toolchain is binary distributed from http://seiner.com/ts7000/ .
It's based on gcc-3.4.4 and glibc-2.3.2.
I'd like to work on supporting these boards with gentoo, but I have a
few points that are a bit stressing:
1) When one wants to build a firmware image for small devices like this,
one usually reverts to some commercial firmware images. We don't even
have any support from OpenWRT yet, but hopefully soon.
Does Gentoo Embedded have a similar menu-driven 'Build Environment', for
creating firmware images like OpenWRT or PTXDist?
It would be extremely useful, especially because that seems to be the
latest with a lot of other embedded build systems.
2) When using the $SYSROOT / xmerge setup (which is great I should add),
the target filesystem still tends to occupy a HUGE amount of space, much
greater than the 13 or so MB that I would like to allocate to
non-custom-application space.
Is there anything in the works to create some standard byte-usage
minimizations scripts for the xmerge / $SYSROOT scripts? I know that the
FEATURES="nodoc noman" flags help, and INSTALL_MASK=".h" as well, but
what about masking for binary-only files?
Woult it even be possibly conceivable to have a client app to install
gentoo precompiled tbz2's ? Like a client-side package manager?
3) This is completely unrelated, but after checking out iPodLinux,
running it on my iPod, and looking at their excellent core-module
design, I've started writing something like PodZilla, except calling
it ArmZilla (and w/o the iPod UI things). I'm hoping to build modules
for practially anything from serial-ethernet threaded access interlacing
(for network clients) to writing a java/C shared memory segment to get
around using a lot of JNI features that might be sketchy on the ARM.
Anyway, just a couple of survey questions ...
3.i) how compatible are most applications with uClibc ? For instance
OpenVPN, avahi, ... and others. Will a kernel compiled w/ glibc run well
w/ a kernel compiled with uclibc ?
3.ii) Does anyone on this list have pointers on trying to get Java and C
to co-exist and interact on ARM boards?
Sorry for the long post :P
~/Chris
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