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Embedded Gentoo?
An anonymous reader writes "Gentoo Linux may soon begin showing up in consumer gadgets, thanks to a new project creating an embedded version of Gentoo Linux. The year-old project has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM. The releases include native core system binaries, along with toolchains for native or cross-platform compiling. Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"
What makes Gentoo any better than any of the other distros at doing this? What unique advantage does it offer to this application? The one big difference with Gentoo, the whole thing about compiling everything from scratch, seems like it would be a pretty serious liability for this purpose. So, why Gentoo?
You can control all the compiler flags, so you can build binaries that are optimized for size and memory footprint - rather then the desktop world where things are usually speed optimized (funroll-loops please :)
You can also just built the parts of the application that are relevant to your product.
Using any source that's not your own (whether you compile it or not) is a liability - fortunately law makes sure that corporations dont really have to worry about that.
Depending on how they set up the cross compile environment this could be a very very good thing.
.mk files and ensuring that I have all the right patches for each package, or even worse porting the packages myself. This is all assuming they set the portage system up so that emerge can be used to send packages to the cross compiler and merged into the root filesystem being created.
Recently I have been doing lots of devel. work to be used on Gumstix. At present I already need to compile the full root filesystem and flash that to the Gumstix, so there isn't much change there, but provided that the emerge and USE system work well without adding bloat like the emerge system itself or Python to the system image, this would make an excellent tool as it would remove the headache of creating
I am an embedded software engineer, so hopefully I know what I am talking about. I work with ARM chips, and every linux system that I have built has been compiled from scratch. Not because I want to, or because I am some kind of speed freak - but because in general there are not any up to date binary packages for ARM available. Or if there are you often find that they are not compiled quite right for your particular needs.
Using a Gentoo like system to cross-compile apps with the options, etc that you need is an excellent idea. Some features that I would like to see in this project
o Keep the code for a package unpacked, so that I can make code changes to that package, recompile it & the package management system will build my changes into the binary. Updating the package version could auto merge my changes.
o Auto generation of root directories, in the file format you want (ie, nfs, cramfs, initrd, etc)
o Able to maintain several different configurations at once, ie one Gentoo maintained set of packages for my iPaq, and one set of packages maintained for my custom device. And to completely rebuild them I could go "emerge -set-board iPaq; emerge -u world"
I made the mistake of reading through the comments on this story. So far I have read the same compiling jokes as always... har har. Then I read the usual gentoo bashing comments... *rolls eyes* then I read I disturbing number of people defending gentoo with arguments that make no sense. I love gentoo. please please please to all you other gentooers dont make us look so dumb.
First I see the usual comments about how it makes no sense to use gentoo for embedded stuff because you don't need package management. Then I see the people defending gentoo for the blah blah features that make no difference for embedded devices.
Some developers will find this usefull others, will not. Some hobby geeks will compile x on an ipaq for fun, but normal people will cross compile on another machine.
The REAL advantage here is that somebody who is really good with portage will be able to dev complete systems for the embedded device very quickly and easily. The advantage here is completely different than the advantages gentoo on the desktop gives. The developer will (eventually) be able to wip up systems with a few commands rather than carefully assembling the parts, sounds like a good thing right? thought so.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"
;-) not Gentoo, native compiling is a great curiosity but simply works for many GNU projects. Great to make impressions on WinCE users, whose usability of the PDA is rather limited in sortiment of apps in comparision with full abilities of linux on the same hardware. I have already converted several coders from windows to linux just by demonstration of my iPAQ running at the same time a web server, python curses app in terminal, Quake1 in dynamic desktop icon and C compilation on background.
Although I am using Familiar Linux on iPAQ (for years
Of course, for serious development or building whole system from the bottom I would rather suggest crosscompilation. iPAQ memory is too small to use templates in C++. And, by the time the build of X11 will be finished, certainly X22 will be the standard....
There you are, staring at me again.
That they CAN compile on it... I've installed many "desktop" or "personal" distros which don't even come with GCC. Truly sad...
Who moved my sig?