Jimen Ching wrote:
On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Jim Thompson wrote:
uClinux is just another kernel port in the 2.6 tree.
I think uClinux works on non MMU processors also, as well as a different
(non-glibc) clib.
The linux kernel requires no libc. The userspace is quite independent of any
specific libc, though your libc has to support linux of course. I routinely use
uClibc on systems running full linux simply because glibc is huge (multiple
megabytes) while uClibc can be fit into a few hundred kbytes.
uClinux works on processors without a PMMU. The normal example is the Coldfire
and Dragonball series of Motorola 68ks. There are some consequences, of course,
of trying to run a unix like OS on a system without an MMU, but a lot of things
will "just work" as everything still uses normal Linux semantics.
At work, we've been using a stripped down Redhat as the OS for a control
application. We wanted to go the PowerPC route, but we never built a
linux system from scratch before, so we chose x86 and Redhat to reduce
risk.
How small can redhat be made anyway? I've got multiple systems running off 8MB
of flash (and sometimes I'm lucky with that, my Tuxscreen only has 4MB of flash,
though I have since added a 64MB CF card for extra storage). Normally, the
problem is when you start involving things that need to be secure as OpenSSL is
very common, but also very large (it weighs in at about 1.5MB or so; I've never
gotten it smaller than 800k). There are alternatives for SSH, but not all other
security protocols.
I'll go checkout this Familiar distro...thanks.
Be aware, Familiar only runs on iPAQs and Zauruses (Zaurii?). All the packages
are binaries compiled by the author in no particular fashion, so it is
definately not portable to non ARM-based architectures.
--jc
--MonMotha
