Re: [woody,debinst]
On Fri 21 Jul, bug1 wrote:
> So, on your strongarm you only have 4MB of permenant storage ?
> What sort of applications do you use on it?
That was just an example, but not an extreme one. This would be a
single-purpose unit with just a kernel and initrd on the flash disk/ROM
which get uncompressed into RAM. The initrd would contain whatever
special-purpose software you wanted to run plus some utils/support code.
> Maybe the way to go for really tight situations like that is to generate
> an image on another machine. That way you can have regualar tools around
> to creat the image, you could remove docs and other non-exential things
> beforehand.
>
> Then installing could be just moving moving the image onto your
> permanent storage, however you do that...
>
> You would have to have access to a desktop machine though, how do you
> presently do it?
Yes this is the normal way of working. You develop on a desktop linux box
(usually crosscompiling from x86 to ARM) and installation consists of
running some kind of boot loader which can initialise the RAM, CPU and
serial port, then suck and execute some code - ie enough for you to
download a proper kernel+ramdisk and try real things out.
Some machines (PDAs, handhelds) will use the same method but have much
more permanent storage (eg big CF card, or one of those tiny CF hard
drives). In this case starting the installation (ie booting the kernel)
is as above but then a much more 'normal' desktop-style install can take
place over serial, ethernet or some kind of bus connection. If there is a
CF slot then that could potentially be used as boot-media in place of
floppies or CDs, assuming the device has some mechanism for booting from
CF.
Hope that gives a better idea of the sorts of things we are talking
about.
Wookey
--
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel (00 44) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
Reply to: