Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted Apr 28, 2010 9:23 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development by warmcat
Parent article: Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

There's a different limitation: disk space.

I have a nice little SheevaPlug based on the same Marvell CPU you mentioned. It's an ARM device with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash. That CPU and 512MB of RAM is more than enough for for building. But 512MB of flash is practically nothing if you also want to keep a build environment around.

I actually run it from a 4GB SD card. This gives a bit more space for a build system, but still, not as much as I'd like.

Being able to build packages on a stronger x86 system I have around is also useful.

Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted Apr 28, 2010 14:19 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

If you have networking you can always use NFS.

Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted Apr 29, 2010 11:36 UTC (Thu) by warmcat (guest, #26416) [Link] (1 responses)

> I actually run it from a 4GB SD card.

I can absolutely recommend that approach... unlike the on-PCB flash you can put a normal filesystem on it (we use ext4 with great results) and you can upgrade it any time, 16GB SD Cards are now available and 32GB will be along soon. You can pop it out and use on a host via SD slot as well.

On the device I am working on we go a bit further and do true SD Card boot (the bootloader is on the SD Card, ROM on the CPU fetches and runs it) which has the advantage the whole this is unbrickable.

BTW for Fedora, we use a 2GB root partition to hold all the -devel and rootfs files and it's enough for our purposes so far.

Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted May 6, 2010 14:31 UTC (Thu) by dominosrob (guest, #63549) [Link]

From what I've read the write speed performance of the SD card will gradually degrade due to the lack of a TRIM function. This has become a big enough issue that Windows Vista and newer Linux kernels utilize the TRIM function on SSD drives that support it. But this function has yet to be put on SD cards (probably cause their designed for digital cameras!)

NAND flash may be better suited since the wear-leveling is integrated into the filesystem software (Flash Translation Layer).