piCore-11.0alpha1a released

[bmarkus]

First version of piCore-11.0 released. It is a very first alpha version based on 4.19.81 kernel and expected to work with all boards, including RPi4. There is a common, single SD card image however for convenience can be downloaded from all architecture specific directories:

http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv6/test_releases/RPi/
http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv7/test_releases/RPi/
http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv7l/test_releases/RPi/

No TCZ's uploaded yet. If you need a kernel module, use the full module archive:

http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv6/releases/RPi/src/kernel/
http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv7/releases/RPi/src/kernel/
http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/armv7l/releases/RPi/src/kernel/

[mung]

Do you have any system outline information available?

I am wondering about things like a list of packages/libraries and their versions and what compiler settings used.

And a rather long list of questions below:

Is an X11 server available?

Is all code ARMv6 based?

Does the boot use init or systemd?

What is the boot process i.e. how does the thing bootstrap (what bootloader, how is kernel selected, initrd file, squashfs,

Finally any idea about running with the asus tinker board (I have run raspbian on tinkerboards simply by copying the raspbian root fs and some minor changes over a standard tinker os image), I am wondering what kernel options are required for a tinycore boot squashfs and also bootstrap files to load the kernel and set root partitions etc.

[bmarkus]

mung

in general I kindly advice to get familiar with previous versions of piCore and study repositories and read forum posts. piCore is not a generic distribution like Raspbian but a toolkit targeting mainly embedded applications, therefor X11 wqill come after the main CLI tools, servers, etc. All extensions built for armv6. piCore is a RPi variant of Tiny Core Linux with the same basic philosophy. No systemd at all.

I have never seen a tinkerboard, but if Raspbians run it, piCore can.

Take a Raspberry board, ply with it first to learn piCore.


Regards,

Béla

[mung]

mung

in general I kindly advice to get familiar with previous versions of piCore and study repositories and read forum posts. piCore is not a generic distribution like Raspbian but a toolkit targeting mainly embedded applications, therefor X11 wqill come after the main CLI tools, servers, etc. All extensions built for armv6. piCore is a RPi variant of Tiny Core Linux with the same basic philosophy. No systemd at all.

I have never seen a tinkerboard, but if Raspbians run it, piCore can.

Take a Raspberry board, ply with it first to learn piCore.


Regards,

Béla

Thanks for reply, I could still do with some more info though I may try loading the image on a rpi this weekend I would rather have some details of system components you used before I try making tests.

I have tried to help you improve this by adding a half assed wiki addition that anyone interested could add information to:
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/picore:installation

I am hoping if I try your alpha image there will be option to

Code: [Select]

cat /proc/config.gz

And I assume packages should be a simple:

Code: [Select]

mount package.tcz package -t squashfs -o loop,ro
    [EDIT]: Fixed code tags.  Rich

[Rich]

Hi mung
Welcome to the forum. Just wanted to let you know,  code  tags get wrapped in  [] , not  <>.

[Greg Erskine]

hi Mung,

Have you read the "Into the Core" book yet?

http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html

This great little book explains the principles behind TinyCore and most of it applies to piCore.

The piCore boot partition closely resembles the standard Raspbian boot partition, so no need to document it as it will quickly be out-of-date. Just refer to Raspbian documentation.

regards
Greg

regards
Greg

[emanspeaks]

I seem to have found a bug.  I noticed I was seeing different behavior with and without the "showapps" bootcode.  I traced it back to /usr/bin/tce-bootload, where the print statements with the flush keyword fail.  I know that keyword is a fairly recent addition (docs say it was added in Python 3.3), and despite "sys.version" from micropython reporting 3.4.0, it does not recognize this keyword.  Looked through their issues on GitHub and didn't see any about this, but I didn't dig too deep, nor did I confirm that any newer versions fix the problem.

The workaround is to remove the flush keywords from prints.

There is also a rogue color in the prints that never gets reset back to normal text, so the console was just in yellow until I reset the terminal.

I can only confirm these on the armv7l build.

There are also a number of Python warnings about comparison between byte and str that seem to be related to importing the tc module in general.  Nothing causing actual problems as far as I can tell, though.

[mung]

I have just had problems with some very old bit rotten code I thought I would try compile and fails on the alpha image.

I tried compile this from latestest tinkerboard armbian (https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/) but with  a raspbian root filesystem as I sort of assumed from ( piCore boot partition closely resembles the standard Raspbian boot partition, so no need to document it) that raspbian would be compatible to do a tcz compile and some of the stuff worked but it seems there maybe some serious incompatiblities between libc-2.29.so on tc and raspbian libc-2.28.so.

I seem to get segfaults that do not occur on raspbian.

I messed around for a couple of hours then finally thought maybe its the libs that are the problem, (I wish I had thought of it first but did not as seemed a list of libs are not necessary)

Unfortunately I don't have time to try a dogfood compile.

Maybe another week I have some spare time.

[emanspeaks]

/opt/shutdown.sh is also not executing on shutdown.  Not sure if that is new/expected behavior or not.  I'd like to add something to this script, though, so I am trying to think of a workaround that would make it work without a fix to the core and remaster.

[Rich]

Hi emanspeaks08
/usr/bin/exitcheck.sh  calls  /opt/shutdown.sh  on the  x86  version. I would expect piCore to do the same.

[bmarkus]

/opt/shutdown.sh is also not executing on shutdown.  Not sure if that is new/expected behavior or not.  I'd like to add something to this script, though, so I am trying to think of a workaround that would make it work without a fix to the core and remaster.

How do you shutdown the system, which command used?

[emanspeaks]

I've tried with both halt and reboot, but neither are printing the echo statements/performing the commands I have put in the shutdown.sh script.  If you can't recreate the issue, definitely let me know and I'll see if I can dig in further myself. 

[Rich]

Hi emanspeaks
Check for  /usr/bin/exitcheck.sh.

[Rich]

Hi emanspeaks
To reboot:

Code: [Select]

exitcheck.sh rebootTo turn the machine off:

Code: [Select]

exitcheck.sh poweroff

[bmarkus]

I've tried with both halt and reboot, but neither are printing the echo statements/performing the commands I have put in the shutdown.sh script.  If you can't recreate the issue, definitely let me know and I'll see if I can dig in further myself.

halt/reboot are the original Linux commands. If you want backup, you must explicitly use TC's own backup script first or the script others adviced.