On Aug 10, 2004, at 10:37 PM, MonMotha wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:
the non-MMU parts that made uClinux special are now part of the 2.6
kernel tree.
Yes they are, though I haven't had a need to play with it yet as I do
mostly ARM and embedded x86 work (well, and work on things that will
NEVER run Linux)
never say never. :-)
Most of my recent work has been Xscale (which is arm at its core) and
VIA's embedded x86 parts, though MIPS still
features as a strong #3.
There are uClinux-specific patches to the tree, but they dont' do
much.
While glibc won't work on MMU-less systems, there are many libc-like
libraries that will, including
dietlibc, newlib, and uClibc. As a bonus, when uClibc is run on a
system with an MMU, you get support for shared libraries.
Erik Andersen (the maintainer of uClibc, busybox, and other items in
the embedded linux toolbox) has recently
even made a complete uClibc-based debian 'woody' distribution (named
'uWoody') available. This is pretty cool, as its a built-from
scratch distribution, rather that the more typical "hack things back
out" approach.
there are also uClibc-based variants of gentoo (easier to do than
debian)
Perhaps someone will release a uClibc variant of FC2.
Well, while we're on the topic, I have some of my "hack it out until
it works" based things, though recently I've been experimenting with
buildroots and maybe OpenEmbedded.
http://monmotha.mplug.org/flplinux/
http://monmotha.mplug.org/smallsys/
Buildroot was the basis for the very early musenki tree
(http://www.netgate.com/~jim/Musenki), which begat the Vivato tree,
which ...
http://monmotha.mplug.org/tuxscreen-image.jffs2 is what runs on my
tuxscreen, though I need to redo it.
The musenki boards ran jffs2 as well. The image included things like
an SSL-enabled web server and open ssh (this was in the days before
dropbear and friends).
All those are very old, but demonstrate what kind of space you can
actually cram Linux into if you work at it.
similar dates even. Hmm!
I've seen Linux fit in under 1MB before. You can have an entire
userspace in under 500k if you really want to (busybox/uClibc and some
shell scripts, statically link busybox to uClibc), though it won't do
much other than boot.
We sell linux-based 802.11 devices that fit everything (web server, ssh
and all) in under 2MB.
4MB allows me to add things like snmp, captive portals and ad-hoc
routing (olsr).
8MB of flash is pure luxury.
And then I have this 7 Ethernet, 2 miniPCI ixp425 board with 16MB of
flash/64MB of ram here. No idea what I'm gonna do with it yet. :-)
