LinkSys courts Linux hackers

LinkSys courts Linux hackers

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