Ow Mun Heng wrote:
On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 21:23 -0700, Zac Medico wrote:
Ow Mun Heng wrote:
I'm talking about something stripped down. Perhaps not to a size of 8MB
but something less than 100MB would be good.
How does one do that?
This will be a box which will not have portage included once everything
is up.
Most likely will be building with uclibc and the uclibc stage1.
Any other pointers? And how does one substitute bash(and others) with
busybox can it be defined up front so it portage doesn't pull in the
dependencies etc?
Have you seen this howto?
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Embedded_Gentoo
It recommends for you to chroot into a stage3 and then use the ROOT evironment
variable to make portage install into an empty filesystem.
Well, it I haven't I most certainly will this weekend then.
Thanks.
Anyone Else has experience with using GNAP? Gentoo Network Appliance
Also, did you know about the gentoo-embedded mailing list?
http://marc.10east.com/?l=gentoo-embedded&r=1&w=2
Again.. something I didn't know.. Thanks. I do know about the
gentoo-embedded irc channel but no one ever talks in there and there's
no activity whatsover there at all.
:-)
Thanks again.
Zac
Are you aiming for a general purpose system or an 'appliance'? I don't
have any experience with embedded stuff but if you want it as a desktop
machine there are a few things you could do.
One thing that comes to mind is to mount portage data dirs over the
network. I got a few gentoo machines and they all share
/usr/portage/distfiles over nfs and the performance is ok. I dont see a
reason why all of /usr/portage cannot be mounted over network Once you
set up your machine how you want it, maybe you can move the /var/db to
another machine and mount that over the network for infrequent updates.
I would think without these two the actual portage itself wouldn't be
very large.
Also I had an idea that you might get away with not having a compiler on
the machine. I never used distcc but I keep hearing of people using it.
I had a look at its dependencies and it doesnt depend directly on gcc so
maybe it is possible to, once its installed, to do all compilation
remotely? You would still need binutils to do the linking I guess.
All these changes are not as radical as just removing these parts of
Gentoo altogether and they would make a machine dependent on another
machine (fileserver and compilation server) but they would leave the
machine easily upgradeable. Just depends on what you want to do.
There are also couple of settings in the kernel setup under 'Configure
standard kernel features (for small systems)' which can make kernel size
smaller but I think those might be for really small embedded systems.
Another thing you could try which I haven't heard of is pick the
CFLAGS="-Os' for size rather than performance. Not sure if there are any
other flags which reduce code size. Seems to make a difference though:
http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/csibe/s-i686-linux.php .
And there is always USE="-*" when doing the stage1 install to disable
all features by default.
Eugene.
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