Hi,
First of all, thanks for this kind reply, its like a tutorial for me.
What I am trying to do is to find out if I can create a firewall box like sonicwall etc. from scratch. I mean, I buy an embedded hardware like they use, create an OS for it and make that embedded hardware load it from its flash card.
As far as I understand from your email and googling the web, I need to build an embedded linux os to do that.
But why do I need to cross compile to build a floppy distro? It will just boot on x86 machines?! (can be a silly question, but not much docs. to read and learn about this)
Thanks..
-- Erol YILDIZ
On Wed, 6 Apr 2005 14:04:35 +0000, Bennett Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
2005-04-06T05:04:09 Erol YILDIZ:Is it possible to create mini linux distros (like coyote linux etc.) with LFS?
Yes and no.
LFS is a cross- and self-bootstrapping exercise, a tutorial in how to build and bootstrap Linux systems from original sources.
While an OS certainly could be bootstrapped into existence on a machine with only a single 1.44MB floppy and 8MB RAM (Coyote) that OS wouldn't be Linux, and the compilers and text manipulation programs using in the bootstrapping wouldn't be the GNU toolchain. It wouldn't be LFS.
But Coyote and other such mini Linux distros aren't LFS-like self-bootstrapping systems, they're more like the common embedded Linux cross-development pattern, where you build the distro on a nice big powerful system with scads of disk using luxurious GNU tools, and there you compile the minimized kernel, and embedded components like e.g. Busybox.
If possible how small can it be?
How small can you squoze your kernel config to support the hardware you require? What apps do you require, how small can they be built?
When going for "as small as possible", you can go with dietlibc and assorted really teensy utilities, and construct something where the large majority of the code is the smallest possible kernel.
Next step up, use Busybox and uClibc and it's quite easy to populate all you need of /bin and /sbin with about a hundred links to a single 680KB statically linked executable, smaller if you don't enable everything.
I haven't tried, no longer have any hardware that'd make it desireable, but I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to make a 1.44MB floppy distro. Hmm. No, not too hard, I just cranked down 2.4.29 to a 365KB bzimage. Now it'd be pretty boring, just that and a BusyBox, since that doesn't include any hard drive support, or networking, or anything else. But I suspect with some care in picking and choosing just what bits you want, it wouldn't be too hard to construct a useful Linux floppy. It wouldn't be an LFS, but an LFS would be a fine development platform from which to construct it.
-Bennett
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