Building Distros Directly To HD (Was: Re: OE Booth during fosdem)

Building Distros Directly To HD (Was: Re: OE Booth during fosdem)

[Mark Gollahon]

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Jim Thompson wrote ..
> 
> On Feb 14, 2007, at 1:17 PM, gerwin van der kruis wrote:
> 
> > Op woensdag 14-02-2007 om 12:53 uur [tijdzone -1000], schreef Jim
> > Thompson:
> >
> >> And I'm willing to throw cash, hardware and time at this.
> >>
> >> Yes, we sell WRAP boards, but I'm not looking to get a bunch-o-free
> >> development out of the process.  (We sell a Gateworks ixp42x board
> >> too, just to be perfectly honest.)
> >>
> >> Years ago, I ran (and owned) 'musenki' (google for it or look here:
> >> http://he-colo.netgate.com/~jim/Musenki/.  We had build a  set of
> >> Motorola 8245/8241 boards, and I'd made linux run on them.  I
> >> remember spending a horrific amount of time with a (very) early
> >> version of "buildroot".  OE is so much more sophisticated that I'm a
> >> bit taken aback.
> >>
> >> The OE learning curve is still quite steep, but I think it would be
> >> less steep with a) a bit more documentation and b) an EZ way to start
> >> creating "little distros" that
> >> run on PCs using it.
> >
> > I remember we had this discussion before , the problem is the
> > bootloader, for example grub requires some extra handlings to get
> > installed probarly.
> 
> There appears to be a decent start on "here are the set of steps"  
> here: http://kbarr.net/bochs
> 
> (I've only recently discovered this.)

I've done this "a million times" when I was building Gentoo for WRAPs and Routerboards.  Its not hard to throw files onto a HD or CF, chroot into the "image", and push grub to install itself.  The three things needed were:

(1) x86-based PC that had a Pentium or better processor,
(2) IDE connection for the target media (i.e. CF-to-IDE adapter board for CF cards to be recognized as IDE HDs in the afore-mentioned PC), and
(3) the Linux<->grub drive mapping (usually very easy to figure out, but there are situations...).

Trying to do the grub install via a USB reader/external HD was touchy, but I did manage to figure out how to DD grub's stage 1 and 1.5 and make it work.  However, the CF-to-IDE adapter was much more reliable (but had the down-side of rebooting to change the CF card).

I'll see if I can dig up the instructions and post them.

> > I think if you write a script which automate the installation of for
> > example grub and than copies automatically the files over to cf you 
> > are
> > finished , I did it once long time ago for an embedded voip pabx.
> 
> I once made 'lilo' work with a buildroot-based system.  The makefile  
> is attached.
> 
> I never could get 'grub' to do the same thing, though I prefer grub  
> to lilo.

The scripts I had did all of the work except for the grub part.  Shouldn't be too difficult to resurrect the DD instructions for grub, though.

> > As Koen said I am working on x86 projects like wifi-radio (with a
> > mini-itx board and some small additions) a set top box and a thin
> > client.So we are working on it !!
> 
> Is the wifi-radio tree available anywhere?

Yea, I'd like to see that, too.

Regards,
-Mark Gollahon

Re: Building Distros Directly To HD (Was: Re: OE Booth during fosdem)

[Roderick Taylor]

> > >> The OE learning curve is still quite steep, but I think it would be
> > >> less steep with a) a bit more documentation and b) an EZ way to start
> > >> creating "little distros" that
> > >> run on PCs using it.
> > >
> > > I remember we had this discussion before , the problem is the
> > > bootloader, for example grub requires some extra handlings to get
> > > installed probarly.

I build "little distros" for x86 and test them out with QEMU. QEMU can
boot a kernel from a file you specify from the command line, so you
don't have to worry about grub. You also don't have to invest in any
hardware.  There is a machine qemux86.conf in the org.oe.dev.

Using QEMU has helped me navigate the learning curve.

The fiddly part is writing the filesystem to a QEMU virtual hard disk.
 To do this I first boot qemu with a ploplinux iso image, start the
network, fdisk, mkfs, wget the oe file system and extract files to the
virtual disk.  Once I've got an intial OE image on there, I just use
ipkg to upgrade and test any other software I need to stick on there.

A smart thing to do would be to modify busybox configuration for use
in an initramfs, create an image that has only networking, fdisk, grub
and mkfs and use this instead of ploplinux.  Creating this sort of
image is what OE is good at. I plan on switching to real hardware when
it finally arrives and do this. (if someone hasn't done it already).

Re: Building Distros Directly To HD (Was: Re: OE Booth during fosdem)

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Dnia piątek, 16 lutego 2007, Roderick Taylor napisał:

> Using QEMU has helped me navigate the learning curve.
>
> The fiddly part is writing the filesystem to a QEMU virtual hard disk.
>  To do this I first boot qemu with a ploplinux iso image, start the
> network, fdisk, mkfs, wget the oe file system and extract files to the
> virtual disk.  Once I've got an intial OE image on there, I just use
> ipkg to upgrade and test any other software I need to stick on there.

Poky has scripts which make it VERY easy:

poky-qemu bzImage-qemux86.bin ANY-image-qemux86.rootfs.ext2

do ALL work ;)

http://www.rpsys.net/openzaurus/qemu/ is MUST read for using Qemu with OE.

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