Linux in consumer electronics
Linux in consumer electronics
Posted Oct 11, 2007 10:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)Parent article: Linux in consumer electronics
Using glibc on an embedded platform with a 10Mb memory budget strikes me as... strange. This is explicitly not the environment it's targetted at: why not use uClibc, which *is* explicitly meant to play well on embedded systems?
Posted Oct 11, 2007 16:01 UTC (Thu)
by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
[Link] (1 responses)
If you look at our Linux download site, and can't find the C library package, that's an indicator that we're using our own C library on that product.
One example is the
DSC-T100 still camera. For that product, you'll see that the list of open source user-space components is very small (only 5 packages).
Posted Oct 11, 2007 16:52 UTC (Thu)
by daney (guest, #24551)
[Link] (1 responses)
If you are concerned about memory consumption you should also look at the pre-linker which reduces the number of dirty pages in shared libraries. Support for this may be better in glibc.
The different C libraries have different strengths, you have to decide on a case by case basis which is better for a given situation.
Posted Oct 11, 2007 19:17 UTC (Thu)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
Using glibc in the most RAM-constrained devices is indeed odd. Sony started looking at glibc alternatives some years ago, and at least a few products have already shipped with something else. A few Sony products have shipped with uClibc, and some have shipped with our own minimized C library (which is even smaller than uClibc).
Linux in consumer electronics
The last time I checked (for mipsel-linux) the sizes of glibc an uClibc as reported by 'size' were about 1200KB vs. 750KB which is considerable if you have a 10MB RAM budget. When you go to 20MB and consider paging and the afore mentioned over-commit, the size difference starts to become less important. Other things to consider are binary compatibility between versions and availability of a high performance thread library (NPTL).Linux in consumer electronics
Big reason for using uClibc instead of glibc would be need for static binaries, static glibc binaries are huge and not even really static...Linux in consumer electronics