Tiny Core Linux
General TC => General TC Talk => Topic started by: mb on December 20, 2011, 07:11:22 PM
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I want, essentially, a microcore for ARM, to use primarily with the upcoming RasberryPi. Not for general purpose use, but (mostly) for headless tasks like home server, media centre, music player, home automation, maybe router, etc etc. So i want a bare-bones linux. Microcore would be pretty close to what I want, but there is no ARM version.
What would people recommend as the best choice??
-Stripped down debian
Debian has an ARM version and will officially support rPi, too. But how easy is it to strip it down? (can anyone reccomend a good guide or something?) The default install size is way too big, and i'd guess there are saving to be made re: memory use, too.
-Use a 'router' linux
Like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc... some areas i'm not sure about with these, but would definitely provide a stable, v. low resources base. I like the possibility of flashing/ external updating.
-Roll my own linux
This would provide a 'perfect' distro, in theory.. but is it practicle? How hard is it?? (again, any guides??)
-Convert TCL
Is anyone working on this?/considering it? Or has it been done? .. again, i'm not sure of the level of complexity involved compared to 'starting from scratch' (my guess is it would be harder for someone like me, but easier for someone up to speed with TCL dev)
-Another Distro?
Is there another v. lightweight linux, which supports ARM??
For anyone who hasn't been following it the RPi should be out early next year (as in January; they have finalised the design, made 100 beta boards on the 1st). 128MB ram for the base model.
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I'm considering converting TCL, shouldn't be hard. Most work would be providing useful extensions I guess.
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This would provide a 'perfect' distro, in theory.. but is it practicle? How hard is it?? (again, any guides??)
cross linux from scratch
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hi mb,
i share your opinions.
perhaps we are lucky and some more folks are looking for the same goal!
an arm-port for microcore would be really good:
i guess that they could be a dream team, that would be a benefit fo both,
for the raspberrypi and for tinycore.
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following the clfs documentation worked fine for tinycore on the cell processor in a ps3, you could aways give this a go for arm..
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Yep, CLFS doesn't have ARM as a supported target, so you'd need to only use it as guidelines though.
Alternatively, use one of the build frameworks the router linuxes use, buildroot yocto and the rest of the pack.
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What do you guys think about a tinycorelinux ARM port based on uclibc instead of glibc? I would probably go the armv5 or armv7 route. But can't decide...
Perhaps all variants and hard float even, depending on how bad it will seem when I'm at it eventually.
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All variants? :o
You and what army ;) (there's quite a bit of those variants once you look deeper...)
On uclibc, while there's (so far) no binary-only software on ARM to worry about, uclibc still loses in features and performance (and has a bit more bugs). On these grounds I would recommend against it.
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Hiro, do you have any ARM devices currently/ are you planning on getting the r.Pi?
The RasberryPi will use an ARM 11 cpu, which is ARM v6. Most new devices are cortex's (v7).
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I have a dockstar, iomega iconnect (both kirkwood) and a toshiba ac100 (tegra 2).
I will get a rasberry pi if they won't mess with us and delay or overprice it in Europe.
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So has anyone done anything about an ARM TinyCore ?
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I'm still running a debian and two ubuntus on them and have not yet found a justification to change or reinvent anything about that.
Perhaps an other time when I don't have anything to do :D
Try the archlinux distros in the meantime.
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I don't have the hardware (yet), but I wouldn't mind giving it a go of porting Microcore to ARM.
Someone would have to send the hardware to me first though. ;D
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Maybe ask Genesi:
http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/program/imx6/add (http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/program/imx6/add)
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Great martin, make a request!
However, I am willing to participate in a whip-round for buying an arm to any developer decides to build tinycore for arm
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No kidding, some of the hardware, even on ebay, is slightly beyond my impulse purchase limit. I already have some of the environment set up for when I was wanting to build stuff for DD-WRT which uses ARM.
If I had the hardware to play with, I would put serious energy into the porting effort.
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I'm serious, I haven't the skills to do the porting, however, if a team is constituted I believe that I participating in a hypothetical fund for purchase dev tool.
It would be appropriate to estimate the costs and see how many people would be willing to participate.
However, asking arm to powerdeveloper could be a solution.
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The costs for microcore are about 50 Euros currently. My cost problem is time.
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I am planning to purchase a raspberry pi, if and when, such is generally available. First Novemeber, no. Then Decemeber no. Then Ebay bidding war, no. End of January, no. Still waiting... From what I hear non-profit institutions will get them before the general public. Patience is a virture.
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Just thinking on minimal RAM requirement, whether it is different for an ARM system. I expect it is lower than for x86, but must be verified.
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Just thinking on minimal RAM requirement, whether it is different for an ARM system. I expect it is lower than for x86, but must be verified.
Why?
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The costs for microcore are about 50 Euros currently. My cost problem is time.
Sorry?
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I meant the price of a cheap ARM device only able to run microcore (without an X desktop).
Language barriers ;)
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Specs? Without details price is meaningless.
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An interesting read on ARM vs X86
http://vanshardware.com/2010/08/mirror-the-coming-war-arm-versus-x86/ (http://vanshardware.com/2010/08/mirror-the-coming-war-arm-versus-x86/)
Explains why we don't see many ARM netbooks or ARM devices for general purpose computing.
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Well, it is a one and half year old article. Both architectures are developing rapidly. You can compare them but what is more important, can ARM based machines offer acceptable performance with price, consumption, ... benefits over current x86 or not?
BTW, why dob't you consider a MIPS port?
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Nobody approached me at Scale inquiring about MIPS. It's interest would seem to not even be on the radar.
I find interesting is that Arm CortexA8 did not compare well to the lowly Atom.
Core runs well on Atom. The clamour is for these still unavailable super cheap "old" arm devices, e.g., raspberry pi. It's arm processor is older than the article I referenced. Do you see a raspberry pi sporting an A9 or even the mentioned A8?
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Specs? Without details price is meaningless.
The Kirkwood based iomega iconnect for example.
The great thing about ARM platforms is not processing power, but energy efficiency. I also don't like fans on my CPUs.
Better devices will come, and for more competition I hope MIPS manages to get into this segment again. We've been seeing their chips for a long time, most recently embedded in consumer products like dsl routers.
An other point: I also like having one device just for one thing. Don't put CPUs in your computer, instead buy more computers.
On the other hand I'm writing this on an old thinkpad x60s (core duo) without a fan (disabled) which suits me all right. Current figures after 1 hour of web browsing: P=11W, T=49C
And I have two old celerons which are still working. One embedded t-online s100 settop box and a normal fanless tower.
Sometimes it's not the CPU, but peripherals which eat the most, but ARM nonetheless pushes the bar one dimension lower (or was it higher? :D).
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btw would it be ok to use Sourcery G++ for compiling tinycore on ARM? I've compiled some kernels for my private use, but I don't know anything about licenses or such.
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Just having a quick look at what I could find in a hurry (ebay).
VIA ARM-WM8505 clocked at 300Mhz netbook @ US$79.99.
VIA 8650 clocked at 600MHz netbook @ AU$81.99.
another WM8505 netbook currently at AU$24.99 with 4 days to go. Marked as "faulty" but by the description merely sounds like the OEM software has been badly loaded.
The WM8650 is based on ARM11, from what I've read.
Just a FYI.
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I am available, would be to do a separate post to see who wants to join the development and provide the hardware (If that does not go against the policies of the forum).
For those in a hurry, I read that you can test it with qemu http://www.cnx-software.com/tag/arm11/ (http://www.cnx-software.com/tag/arm11/)
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Interesting! I just installed qemu, I'll see about re-setting up the cross-compiler and having a play with this.
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I have an ASUS WL-500 router on the desk for application development. OpenWRT runs fine so if someone comes up with a minimal Core for ARM I can play a bit with. It is an old first generation release with 32M RAM. Flash is also low, but I'm using an external USB stick as a sorage so storage space is not a limitation.
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btw would it be ok to use Sourcery G++ for compiling tinycore on ARM? I've compiled some kernels for my private use, but I don't know anything about licenses or such.
If you're allowed to use it, the output cannot be restricted. I recall their "lite" toolchains were free to use?
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One possible target hardware is a RouterBoard. Usually you can find a second hand board sold by an ISP for reosanable price. No video, no GHz CPU, but there are LAN ports, depending on model USB master ports, flash card socket, etc. They are perfect to play with Core on.
See http://routerboard.com/ (http://routerboard.com/)
Oh, forgot to mention. They are MIPS, not ARM :)
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btw would it be ok to use Sourcery G++ for compiling tinycore on ARM? I've compiled some kernels for my private use, but I don't know anything about licenses or such.
If you're allowed to use it, the output cannot be restricted. I recall their "lite" toolchains were free to use?
Yes, the lite version is free and what I use. I hope to have some more time for this in March or April perhaps.
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IMHO, MIPS wouldn't be bad either. It too has chinese factories making cheap cpus (I have a MIPS tablet actually), but suffers from much the same issues as ARM - cpu fragmentation, and binary blobs for much of the drivers. Though I think the cpu situation is not nearly as bad there as on ARM.
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I recently purchased a Pogoplug POGO-B01 for $19.99:
- Dual-core ARMv6 processor
- 128 MB RAM
- 128 MB Flash
- 5 USB ports
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet port
- 1 SATA port (internal; must open the case to access)
- 1 serial port (internal; must open the case to access; requires TTL to USB converter or equivalent)
This is a server system; it has no video display hardware. The processor is apparently rated at 700+ MHz but underclocked to about 300 MHz by the Pogoplug software.
See Pogoplug Pro/Video/v3 (http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-provideov3) for installation of Arch Linux.
See Debian on a Pogoplug Pro (the easy way with ALARM kernel) (http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,6489) for installation of a Debian root file system with the Arch Linux kernel.
Much non-kernel development can be done on an x86 system with a kernel that has binfmt_misc support: Running ARM Linux on your desktop PC: The foreign chroot way (http://tinkering-is-fun.blogspot.com/2009/12/running-arm-linux-on-your-desktop-pc_12.html).
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I hope to see sooner or later run tinycore on this or something similar http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-3 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-3)
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How long does it take to fully charge this thing in the sun?
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I do not know, I read that they provide twice the running time of loading by hand (1min charge 2min activiry)
then it remains to be seen, the xo2 (which I think was better than that) is not released and xo3 for their old projects had to operate at electromagnetic waves ...
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hiro: 'I'm still running a debian and two ubuntus on them and have not yet found a justification to change or reinvent anything about that.'
TinyCore's boot speed? have you achieved that in debian?
Martin C (or anyone else interested in developing for rPi).. is this useful -- http://russelldavis.org/2012/01/20/new-raspberry-pi-development-vm-v0-2/ (http://russelldavis.org/2012/01/20/new-raspberry-pi-development-vm-v0-2/) ??
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cross linux from scratch
I read a bit on their web site, but whats the point of cross linux from scratch? Sorry if this sounds lazy, not intended.
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Cross-compiling means compiling for one architecture on another, different, architecture - one on which the finished product will not run.
So for example, you can use the instructions to build a working system for ARM using tinycore on an Intel machine.
I used the instructions to compile tinycore for a ps3, finishing about one week before sony effectively forced users to remove linux from their ps3...
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I have (at least) got localized that Xorg, and I hope Samsung printer & CUPS is "easier", so:
GuruPlug ARM-miniserver next. I think microcore would be best for that.
Strategy is "standard TC" stategy, everything not absolytely necessary -> out of the system.
MMU problems may occur with kerner, so kernel port may be diffulcult.
Have to be done, anyway. Volunteers?
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On uclibc, while there's (so far) no binary-only software on ARM to worry about, uclibc still loses in features and performance (and has a bit more bugs). On these grounds I would recommend against it.
What about musl? Anyone have remarks similar to the one above for it?
http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html (http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html)
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musl lacks many features, and focuses only on standard-correct small functions.
This means it occasionally breaks software that works fine on uclibc, due to some nonstandard-but-defacto usage for example.
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musl lacks many features, and focuses only on standard-correct small functions.
This means it occasionally breaks software that works fine on uclibc, due to some nonstandard-but-defacto usage for example.
Thanks, not being competent I miss these notions, which are, however, quite interesting.