Re: [Qemu-devel] ANN: DetaolB v0.4 is released

["Christian MICHON" <christian.michon@gmail.com>]

On 7/5/07, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:
> What's the difference between deltaolb and Firmware Linux, anyway?  I'm still
> curious about this.

a few differences, quite minor actually (that's why I said in the past we
shared many common goals :-) )...

I actually started this in 2002, but then hit many bugs in uclibc. In the end,
I actually used a trimmed LFS approach, using zisofs. My bootable env
then was ~45Mb. At that time, buildroot was also starting... I lacked of
time to work on it.

The biggest difference today is that your firmware is based on automation
or Makefiles, whereas I still use a LFS type of approach. I first build a
static minimal toolchain with a static busybox: all native, no cross
compilation. Then I chroot in it, compile uclibc, busybox, the toolchain.
The rest is obvious, but quite manual. I really should do Makefiles...

The other difference is that I base detaolb on aufs/squashfs (I do not
think you passed that stage yet, if I recall not all the archs you're
targetting can take this). That's today's improvement over the stuff
I did in 2002 using zifofs.

> Oh, by the way, the Fedora for Arm project is also building natively on arm,
> but they got some fast ARM hardware and stuck lots of DRAM and hard drive
> space onto it rather than using QEMU.

in 2003/2004, I also worked on porting linux to an Ipaq h2215. I actually then
used buildroot arm precompiled, and managed to chroot in it using nfs over
usb. quite cool, and the speed was better than qemu today. It was just a
400Mhz Xscale.

I'm still interested in your cross compiling tutorial. I believe we all are :)

If I start putting too many archs in the picture, I believe DetaolB will be
redundant with Firmware. This is not intended. Originally I wanted to
share the portable x86 env I carry on my usb key. Some of you asked
for a sparc32 port. I'll complete this one at least (I'm progressing quite
fast on it).

-- 
Christian
--
http://detaolb.sourceforge.net/, a linux distribution for Qemu