[ale] any ALE members familiar with embedded linux?

[Mike Panetta]

In general the kernel is just a standard linux kernel that may or may not 
(most likely may) have patches to the schedular and other parts of the
kernel to help its real time performance.  This is what Montavista has done
with the HardHat linux.  In fact alot of Montavistas improvements are 
going to be in the 2.6 kernel.  The main value add that the embedded Linux
guys give is a more granular management of what goes on the system,
in terms of controlling the system image size.  Montavista (and possibly
BlueCat and Embeddix) has a tool that lets you choose exactly what you
want in your system image, builds it and creates an image file for you that
you manipulate in whatever way necessary to get it on the system (IE
create a ROM image and burn it to flash, or whatever).

If you want an "embedded" linux without the cost of buying one of the
major distros (which can be very expensive) you may want to look
at the Linux Router Project.  Its been awhile since I have been to the site
so I do not remember where it is, but they had a pretty small and functional
system last time I looked at it.  I once used it to create a linux based floppy
that would boot and allow you to reprogram the MAC address in the
EEPROM on the ethernet card in a very specific piece of hardware.  I remember
it being very easy to work with, and their "packages" if you want to call
them that were basicly gzipped tarfiles that were extracted to a ramdisk on boot.

What kind of system are you going to be putting this on?

Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Bergeron <christopher at bergeron.com>
Sent: Nov 3, 2003 7:02 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] any ALE members familiar with embedded linux?

If so, can I ask you a few questions about embedded linux systems and
how they differ from a normal linux kernel?

Specifically, I'm wondering about BlueCat and Embedix.... do they just
offer packages that let you trim stuff out of the kernel, or is there
more to embedded linux in general that I'm missing?  I don't necessarily
need real-time OS, but I'm moving into the embedded realm.

Are there any embedded-linux specific mailing lists of note that I
should join?

Thanks for any insights...
-CB




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