From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:01:10 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] [Q] Buildroot vs uCLinux In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130626000110.0bbb80cc@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Dear Ezequiel Garcia, On Mon, 24 Jun 2013 14:57:08 -0300, Ezequiel Garcia wrote: > I'm working on a project where the customer has decided to use uCLinux > as the base distribution on a MMU platform. On a platform that has a MMU? Using uClinux-dist doesn't seem like a very wise choice in this case. Which CPU architecture is this platform using? > Can anyone give me any insights on what would be the differences between > this choice, and choosing buildroot instead? > > AFAIK, they're both source-oriented, uclibc-based distributions. Buildroot is not limited to uClibc. It can use glibc or eglibc toolchains just fine, and build systems with those C libraries. > uCLinux seems more > biased towards MMU-less platforms, but since this is not the case, I'd > like to know > if there's something I'm missing, before I suggest my customer to try > Buildroot instead. As Stephan mentions, uClinux-dist stores the complete source tree of most packages directly in the uClinux-dist code base, which makes it quite huge. Buildroot instead always downloads the upstream tarball or Git repository, and only stores in its source tree a few patches for some packages, when needed to make them cross-compile properly. I believe this, by itself, already makes Buildroot a bit more convenient to use. Being on the uclinux-dist-dev and uclinux-dev mailing list since about 3 years or so, I can also say that the amount of e-mails about uClinux-dist is very very low, almost inexistent. Maybe those are no longer the right mailing lists for uClinux-dist development, I'm not sure. There is some regular traffic on those lists, but it's only about Linux kernel support for non-MMU architectures, not the uClinux-dist build system. There are apparently some not too old releases of uClinux-dist (october 2012), but I'm not sure where the development is happening since the CVS repository reference on the project web site seems to contain only very old stuff. I believe that one good indication is that Analog Devices was using uClinux-dist as the build system offered to their Blackfin customers, and last year, they have switched to use Buildroot instead. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux development, consulting, training and support. http://free-electrons.com