On Friday 21 February 2014 01:47:31 Ben Hutchings wrote:
On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 16:19 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thursday 20 February 2014 14:21:10 Ian Campbell wrote:
> For all I know, the only interesting ixp4xx platforms are the consumer
> products listed on http://www.nslu2-linux.org/, the other ones you support
> are development boards that tend to exist only in very small quantities.
>
> The main limitation would be the amount of installed RAM, which is
> either 32MB or 64MB depending on the machine for these. Running a
> modern Debian with these constraints is probably possible but
> doesn't sound like fun.
Our most pressing constraint has actually been the size of the kernel
partition in flash, which is only ~1.4 MB on some of the iop32x and
ixp4xx machines (and ~1.5 MB on one of the orion5x machines). We've
modularised as much as possible and turned off some of the features
that
are otherwise standard across all Debian architectures.
Makes sense. I'm impressed you actually manage to get a modern kernel
in 1.5MB and have it boot up a (mostly) full distro. I think we have
in the past dropped a subarchitecture from the kernel when it turned
out its defconfig could no longer fit within the 2MB of flash it
has.