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? :-)"

Comments

So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?

[eln]

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?

Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?

[papercrane]

I wouldn't say it's more suited, but people fail to realize that gentoo *can* use precompiled packages as well.

The reason I use Gentoo is not just because it compiles for my system, but because I like how it lays things out and its ease and flexibility of configuration.

It should be fairly simple to set up a "host" system with a cross-compiler to make binary packages for the embedded devices to download.

Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?

[kiatoa]

Well, someone has probably already pointed this out but the openembedded.org build system is kinda similar to gentoo in a way. Personally I'd like to see a rubyx or gentoo marriage with openembedded so that developing for embedded devices (a cheap old ipaq H3650 in my case) and keeping the software up to date is made easier. Note that although it is technically feasible to compile on the ipaq cross compiling is orders of magnetude faster and thus worth the setup pain IMHO.

Oh, and to qualify my comment: I'm a wannabe developer, I still haven't gotten an oe build for my iPAQ that I'm happy with.

Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?

[3Suns]

There's nothing about Gentoo that says you have to compile stuff from scratch. And with embedded devices, it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway. Apparently, Gentoo is very good for building specific, shrunken-down distributions, like the recently-released FlashLinux project. Gentoo lets them optimize the packages very easily, to shring down binaries, etc. This is a pretty big concern with embedded devices.

I don't think anyone would really suggest compiling anything big on your PDA.

Complete control

[grahamsz]

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.

This could be really nice!

[Halthar]

Depending on how they set up the cross compile environment this could be a very very good thing.

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 .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.

This is actually a great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

Re:This is actually a great idea

[kardar]

Well, I just recently tried to install Gentoo, but I couldn't even get out of the starting gate. The "bootstrap" process, while taking a while, might be acceptable - if it didn't fail here and there from time to time and require you to go in and change code, apply patches, or take wild guesses at why it's not working, etc... In my case, it appeared that "bootstrap" was, at least, upon first inspection, broken.

So I installed Debian, but I wasn't happy with not having had a choice of filesystems, so I went back and guess what I used - the Gentoo install CD - to boot up, manually mount, and move around my partitions from one to the other and make filesystems that I wanted to try out (JFS). Worked just fine. Used the Gentoo handbook to help me (re)-install GRUB, using the Gentoo install CD, on my brand-new Debian JFS Linux machine.

The Gentoo install process, the install CD, the forums, the handbooks, and much much else is really wonderful and puts a new spin on manipulating and customizing your system (in my case it was Debian).

So I think this is quite possibly a really good idea, because it's exactly the flexibility (I don't mean make.conf or USE flags) of the way things are set up that would allow you to sort of get your hands or brains around other things (in my case a Debian install) using the Gentoo philosophy and processes.

Even though Gentoo is though of as a distribution, I think that's it's really turning into something more than just a distribution - I don't particularly care to run Gentoo Linux on my machine, but I will continue to love the install disk if I need to mess around with my system, and the forums and handbooks, if I need questions answered that can make a lot of difference.

I wish them all good luck, and thank them for their hard work.

penguin on iPAQ is a daily bread for me

[Maljin Jolt]

Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"

Although I am using Familiar Linux on iPAQ (for years ;-) 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.

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....

Just be glad...

[ztwilight]

That they CAN compile on it... I've installed many "desktop" or "personal" distros which don't even come with GCC. Truly sad...