[LUAU] Intro

[Jim Thompson]

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.   :-)