Re: uArch

Denys Vlasenko wrote:

On Wednesday 23 April 2008 15:35, Ed W wrote:
  

I guess you have tried gentoo before embarking down this route?  You can 
drop out a basic bootable image starting at about 5MB and go up from 
there.  Simple to build binary packages and merge them using qmerge.  
Build binary images for the architecture of your choice (although to be 
fair cross compiling for non native architectures adds some extra steps 
which are somewhat complicated).  Use uclibc/mdev/udev or whatever takes 
your fancy...
    

Sounds surprisingly sane.

Maybe it even uses something less arcane than init-with-runlevels-
and-tons-of-scripts-in-/etc?
  

I don't really know arch-linux so I don't know if you are being ironic about that or gentoo?

However, I can dip into the buildroot and turn on or off services using (from my build script):

# Don't start unneeded and unavailable services
rc-config delete keymaps boot
rc-config delete consolefont boot

#setup some default services
rc-config add dropbear default
rc-config add net.eth0 default

Building a root file system is easily scriptable, but the first few lines of my build script look like:

export PROJECT=base1
export EMBEDDED_ROOT=/var/embedded
export ROOT=/var/embedded/builds/${PROJECT}
export PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT=/var/embedded/portage
emerge -vK baselayout
emerge -vK uclibc busybox

Roughly speaking you run this under a chroot which matches your target environment (eg I use an x586 environment although the host is running AMD64), then this builds you a simple (small) base filesystem which will do not much more than boot and give you a busybox shell.  Customise or add software from there. eg:

emerge -avK dropbear postfix dovecot madwifi-ng wpa_supplicant hostapd openntpd dnsmasq e2fsprogs ppp l7-protocols iptables firehol gpsd

See the Tiny Gentoo entry on the gentoo wiki for a leg up, but you can do much better than that and I could be badgered to add my build scripts somewhere if people were interested.  Takes a couple of mins only to build a new base layout (and mine is now about 120MB of stuff using mdev, busybox and uclibc! )

All the best

Ed W


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