Re: chroot setup howto
alias subject "How a newbie feels" :-)
i work since 4 days in the world of embedded systems. i was looking for a
starting point and found Emdebian. (what else? i use debian on my host
machine and it works like a charm).
reading the emdebian homepage/wiki i wanted to try out "emdebsys" and failed
miserably because:
a) the cvs didn't work most of the time (cvs login timed out on 4 out of 5
tries)
b) then the documentations in the cvs tree are so out of date and full of
contraditctions (CML2, kbuild, docu described programs which were not in the
package etc.) that i lost 2 days trying to run emdebsys
after 3 desperate days trying to set emdebsys (see my post in the mailing list
- on which none replied) i found the 1st usefull documentation for newbies
(thx a lot Philippe: http://stag.mind.be/stag_betadoc.pdf) on the stag
project hompage (at this time i had no clue what the difference between stag
and emdebsys was).
there i found also a reference to the irc channel on irc.freenode.org
#emdebian. On the channel i met Philippe who basicly told me that emdebsys is
not finished yet (it toke me 4 days to realize that - and don't tell me now
RTFM - i did, but i was not prepared for pre-pre-pre-alpah stage ;-)
Please remove out of date documentation. it is worse than no documentation.
you see Carl, we have a common problem (i even have the same host/target
platform combination - a geode GX1 processor).
On Monday 31 January 2005 01:05, Quantum Scientific wrote:
> Host distro is Debian Sarge. The (toolchain) sources came from the Debian
> distro tree, as per normal. Specifically:
> deb http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian sarge main
In all the emails i lost track what you really want to do ;-)
ok, lets sum it up:
your host platform intel i686 (?)
host OS: Debian Sarge (kernel-image-2.6.9-2 with header files)
taget platform: Geode (btw it is a i586 not i486)
taget OS? (same kernel? or something else)
Now i can give you my 2 cents.
as far as i understand setting up an embedded system ss done in 2 "separated"
steps :
a) create a tool chain for cross compilation
b) compiling the kernel/applications for your target system, create a root
filesystem, and install all on your target platform
as far as i understood you managed to do setp a) but not b)
cross-compiling is only needed if your target platform differs from the host
platform. and usually you want to compile on the hostplatform because it is
faster than the traget one.
in your case (i assume you have an i686 hostplatform and an i586 target
platform) you don't have to do step a) (as far as i understand - please
correct me if i'm wrong).
in my project i skipped (for now) step a). maybe (if i'm wrong) i have to come
back and work on it later.
here what i have done for setp b)
Philipppe gave me the hint to try out UML (user mode linux). i already played
around with UML a few months ago. so here i go:
a) created image file,, mounted it as loopback, created filesystem, and used
debootstrap (the docu for cdebootstrap is too short for a newbie like me, so
i had no clue how it works) to create a "mini"-debian distribution (with
aprox 170MB)
b) removed all unused packages (exim4, cron, logrotate, ...)
c) removed /usr/shar/doc
d) installed busybox-cvs static
e) removed packages (and libs) which were replacable by busybox
now i'm down to a 135 MB. and the machine is running ist runing on UML.
(debian sarge kernel).
for now it is small enough beacause, in the final stage, i want to boot my
embedded system over NFS. my board has 128MB RAM, which is enough for the
kernel and my applications.
next steps ( not done so far, help/info appreciated):
* booting my prototyp from compact flash (over ide)
* createding/tweaking the kernel for the target platform
* installing this kernel on the root filesystem
* setting up an appropriate filesystem/mount points (what goes in tmpfs, what
over CF/NFS?)
* trying out FIA to boot from network
Btw my HW board is a Geode SP4GX00 from National Semiconductors with a Geode
GX1 processor, BIOS is National's XpressROM which doesn't allow booting from
network (NIC is NSC DP83815).
doesn anyone have a suggestion what BIOS i could use to implement booting over
network?
i hope htis helped you a bit
--
Max Hofer
APUS Software G.m.b.H.
A-8074 Raaba, Bahnhofstraße 1/1
T| +43 316 401629 11
F| +43 316 401629 9
W| www.apus.co.at
E| max.hofer@apus.co.at
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