LinkSys courts Linux hackers [LWN.net]

LinkSys courts Linux hackers

Posted Dec 2, 2005 12:33 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018)
Parent article: LinkSys courts Linux hackers with WRT54GL (LinuxDevices)

I have to say that I disagree with the title here. What LinkSys is doing is putting a new device on the market which does not run Linux, and apparently cannot run it.

Now, it would be nice to understand what allows VxWorks to do the same (?) thing with less footprint. Maybe just the fact that VxWorks is a specialised OS, and Linux is not. And should not be!

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LinkSys courts Linux hackers

Posted Dec 2, 2005 13:31 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> What LinkSys is doing is putting a new device on the market which does not run Linux, and apparently cannot run it.

http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware lists number of wireless routers with 2MB flash/8MB RAM as Work In Progress to put OpenWrt Linux on them.

So such memory constains are not a show stopper to run Linux and I doubt that the reduced flash images were the only reason to switch to VxWorks for LinkSys.

LinkSys courts Linux hackers

Posted Dec 2, 2005 15:39 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

Oh it _can_ run it. They didn't mention changing any of the hardware
interfaces, just the flash and dram. You'd just have to apply Matt
Mackall's -tiny tree, use a stripped down version of busybox with
uClibc... I think a squashfs root with tight decompression buffers would
probably be a win (vs initramfs), but it'll be close. As for run-in place
support... The most trimmed down 2.6 kernel known would eat 1/4 of the
flash... Lotsa balancing and tradeoff analysis necessary here. It's a
challenge. :)

2 megs of flash is pretty tight, but tomsrtbt has always fit on a 1.7 meg
floppy so we know it's doable. 8 megs of ram requires some tweaking too,
but when Linux started it ran in 4 (and swapping was added so it could run
gcc in _2_.)

I'd say the way to start is get the bigger conventional linksys box, strip
down your firmware image so it's small enough, and boot it with mem=8M to
test it out.

Rob