Comments from an rPath engineer... [LWN.net]

Comments from an rPath engineer...

Posted Aug 8, 2008 3:05 UTC (Fri) by JohnNilsson (guest, #41242)
In reply to: Comments from an rPath engineer... by michaelkjohnson
Parent article: Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder

Would/will it be possible to build an appliance for special hardware such as in my case a qnap
ts-209 Pro II ? Their current "firmware" leaves much to be desired so I can see an rBuilder
based firmware being a really nice option...

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Various architecture support

Posted Aug 8, 2008 13:09 UTC (Fri) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438) [Link]

We have not built support for Marvell CPUs in rPath Linux, so this would be a significant undertaking. rPath Linux currently has support only for the x86 and x86_64 instruction sets. We have demonstrated cross-compile for other architectures from time to time, but maintaining cross-builds hasn't been a business focus. An amazing member of the rBuilder community, António Meireles, has been working on cross-builds for the LSB-specified architectures, which has been working out bugs in our cross-build capability. With bugfixes, the tools rPath provides could be used to do a cross-build for Marvell CPUs, but this would be a large undertaking requiring good knowledge of cross-building and rPath's tools; it would not be a cheap and easy way to replace the firmware on your qnap unit.

Coincidentally, rPath's sysadmin just in the past few days built himself a NAS device based on an rBuilder appliance, but it was a Norco NS-520 with an Intel CPU. This significantly reduced the amount of work required...