Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Base => Raspberry Pi => Topic started by: xtal on March 01, 2019, 12:30:11 PM

Title: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: xtal on March 01, 2019, 12:30:11 PM: Hi;

I'd like to help out building things and learning more about how the distribution is put together and doing a scratch build for the Pi port.

I can't find a starting point though - is there any documentation or examples?

Apologies if I've missed something obvious.

Thanks,
Steve
Title: Re: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: Juanito on March 02, 2019, 05:25:08 AM: Are you speaking of building the toolchain from scratch, building an extension from source or something else?

For background information, you can look at the tinycore book, the tinycore git repo and the tinycore wiki.
Title: Re: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: Will8 on March 03, 2019, 04:06:54 AM: If you have a Pi brought anytime in the last year then you have to use the 10.x beta which is substantially incomplete
You can download it here: http://tinycorelinux.net/10.x/armv7/test_relases/RPi/

If your PI is older than this then you'll find 9 to be far more friendly
http://tinycorelinux.net/9.x/armv7/releases/RPi/
Title: Re: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: mocore on March 03, 2019, 04:42:44 AM: Quote from: Will8 on March 03, 2019, 04:06:54 AM
If your PI is older than this(the last year ) then ...

it should possible to update the older picore images /boot partition

with updated firmware files that include support for the latest hw

in fact hear is a script to do that & more github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/blob/master/rpi-update#L187
all though it is intended to run on raspbian !
reading it might provide some hints , eg the update_firmware function
--
with the above in mind
perhaps the most critical part of : Getting started building pi distro?

is booting the pi , for this the [ 0 ] firmware is required to do hw initialization
0 - https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot
0.1 - https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware <-- repo just for boot files

so imho! wrt to pi hw and building distro

step 0) is create a simple disk image and "boot" partition and add the firmware ; then test that this just firmware image can boot ! on your hw.

step 0.0 ) compare firmware configuration files from different raspberry pi distribution images ...
Title: Re: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: Paul_123 on March 03, 2019, 08:31:42 AM: The kernel on piCore 9.x doesn’t have the Ethernet drivers needed for newer rpi boards. 10.x is what you need.

You can of coarse remaster your own system that has all the new firmware and kernels, but uses the 9.x base repo.
Title: Re: Getting started building pi distro?
Post by: xtal on March 11, 2019, 01:41:06 PM: Are you speaking of building the toolchain from scratch, building an extension from source or something else?

Building the toolchain from scratch, also, rebuilding the extension libraries as needed, which is not straightforward in many cases.

I'll check the git repos and see what's in there; this project is very underrated in terms of utility.