2005-04-06T18:52:38 Erol YILDIZ: > 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.
Start by making a floppy-only Linux, it's easiest and you can try it out with generic PC hardware. Cross-developing for genuine embedded hardware requires all the same techniques, plus a couple more. So a floppy linux distro is a gentle first step down the road. Or, perhaps more fun, and a bit easier, build a standalone bootable initrd. They're comfortable to have around, e.g. you can set up one as an alternate lilo target, and as long as the bios can read the boot block and it can read the vmlinuz and initrd, you can get in a position to perform surgery on your hard drive no matter how corrupted the rest of it has gotten. > As far as I understand from your email and googling the web, I > need to build an embedded linux os to do that. Yup. > 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) That confusion is my fault, and I'm sorry for introducing it. Cross-compiling is generally understood and agreed to be compiling one one machine (CPU) architecture to produce executables on another. This involves acquiring or building a cross-compiler, e.g. gcc executables compiled to run on x86, to generate code for Power or ARM or whatever. I erroneously conflated that widely-accepted concept (which you've got right) with the distinct concept of an OS being self-hosting, sometimes also self-bootstrapping, or not. LFS is a full-blown development platform which can recompile itself, with gcc and all the other required dev tools. That ain't embedded. You can construct an embedded Linux using an LFS as a dev platform. -Bennett
pgpZldPoZDmXG.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
