* Re: [gentoo-mips] is gentoo-mips right for me?
@ 2005-12-25 16:28 99% ` Tomasz Chmielewski
0 siblings, 0 replies; 1+ results
From: Tomasz Chmielewski @ 2005-12-25 16:28 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-mips
Stephen P. Becker schrieb:
> Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
>
>> I was wondering if gentoo-mips is a right distribution/tool for me.
>>
>> Here's the summary what I have and what I want to achieve.
>>
>> I am interested in porting apps for wrt54 and similar hardware (they
>> have Broadcom CPUs). When I connect a 2 GB usb-stick to such a device
>> (i.e., to ASUS WL-500g Deluxe or to any other device listed on
>> http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware), a small router could turn
>> into a really useful, rock-stable (no moving parts like hard-disk, fan
>> etc.), cheap, small, quiet, multi-purpose device (domain controller,
>> print server, web server etc.).
>
>
> A good idea...which is already facilitated by openwrt.
Indeed.
That's what I'm using on these routers.
>> As compiling software on these devices directly isn't really a good
>> idea, at first I thought I'd just cross-compile the software.
>> However, very often, cross-compiling is not that easy (sometimes
>> involves lots of patching, which in my case turned out to be
>> duplicating someone's job).
>
>
> Duplicating...you mean like the work openwrt has already done?
Either openwrt or gentoo-mips folks.
It seems to me that there is a chance that gentoo-mips will have more
apps ported than openwrt (which doesn't really have many applications
ported).
>> So I searched the web a bit, and came to a conclusion:
>>
>> I have to run gentoo-mips in qemu on my x86 hardware, compile/port
>> apps there, strip the binaries, and move them to these tiny routers.
>>
>> Is my thinking correct?
>
>
> Theoretically, our mipsel uclibc stages would let you do that, except
> that apparently qemu for mips still has problems with userland programs.
Have you read qemu 0.8.0 changelog? It was released a couple of days ago.
- MIPS and MIPSel User Linux emulation
> That and I don't think qemu is particularly fast.
Whatever slow it is, it will be faster than trying to compile anything
natively on these tiny routers :)
>> Will such compiled software compiled on gentoo-mips run on
>> Broadcom-based routers?
>
>
> If you use the mipsel uclibc stages, and optimize for -march=mips32, sure.
So, this means, that if I build a whole gentoo-mips under qemu - sounds
easy, doesn't it? :), with mipsel uclibc stages/-march=mips32, almost
each and every binary copied from such a system should run on these tiny
routers?
I'm quite new to other architectures than x86.
>> Or maybe I just should give up this idea, as it's totally wrong from
>> the beginning?
>
>
> This is really the smartest thing you have said thus far. Gentoo is
> really not set up to run on these devices. It is far too heavy to
> directly run on them (they don't have enough RAM, and typically not
> enough disk space), and cross-compiling everything is a pain in the ass.
> Folks behind distros like openwrt have already done a lot of hard work
> porting apps and making them compile inside of their buildroot environment.
I never intended to run gentoo on these tiny routers.
I just thought that compiling/porting software for openwrt/mips on
gentoo-mips would be easier than compiling software for mips on a x86
system (I'm really not a cross-compiling expert; and not everything is
ported to openwrt).
>> I could check it myself, but as I failed to run the gentoo-mips livecd
>> in quemu, I'd like to know if I'm doing something reasonable before I
>> invest some time in running gentoo-mips on qemu.
>
>
> The gentoo-mips livecd is definitely not what you want. The userland on
> the cd and included kernels are only for big endian SGI hardware. It
> has no chance of working on anything else. If I recall, qemu emulates a
> little endian, MIPS 4kc cpu.
Now I see why it didn't even start.
--
Tomek
http://wpkg.org
WPKG - software management with Samba
--
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2005-12-25 14:58 [gentoo-mips] is gentoo-mips right for me? Tomasz Chmielewski
2005-12-25 16:01 ` Stephen P. Becker
2005-12-25 16:28 99% ` Tomasz Chmielewski
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