[gentoo-musl] Building musl stage3 images for i486/i586?

[Stuart Longland <stuartl@longlandclan.id.au>]

Hi all,

Has anyone tried running the musl stages through Catalyst to produce new
stage 3 tarballs?  I heard somewhere that the musl builds were produced
using some newer process.

Some time back, I picked up an old Advantech UNO-1150G industrial
computer sporting a 400MHz AMD Geode LX CPU and 256MB RAM, which I have
put to use as a router for my ADSL connection.

For that task, the hardware is well suited.  It's small, low power,
fanless, and will work in conditions the ADSL modem/router will not.
The machine boots from an 8GB compact flash card, and can run on a 9-32V
power supply.

I use a chroot on my faster machines to build the packages, which I can
then install as binaries on the target device.  Long term, I'll be
getting a second CF card, onto which I can boot a container, build some
updates, fire up a VM with the CF card, install the updates, then shut
down the target machine and do a card swap.

On my TO-DO list will be to port Advantech's hacked up 8250 serial
driver to a newer kernel to get the second and third serial ports working.

The device previously ran Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS for a few years
monitoring energy data at a RAAF base.  It did this reliably until the
number of BACnet points it had to monitor got out of hand for the tiny
CPU, and it was retired for a faster unit.

So far, I have the machine running a musl libc-based environment built
on the i686 image.  In spite of the CPU announcing itself as "i586", it
seems to be running okay.  (Then again, Ubuntu is i686 too.)  I'm not
comfortable running i686 code on an i586 CPU however.

I have had some glitches from this machine, including an un-responsive
getty on ttyS0, and wonder if there could be issues stemming from the
i686 instructions being passed to an older CPU.

I am used to doing my own stage 3 tarballs for about 7 years now… having
started doing this back when I was doing it for the Gentoo/MIPS project
and having a 512kbps downlink; it was faster for my 6-core AMD64 desktop
to churn through stage builds than it was for me to download prebuilt ones.

This is easy enough for glibc-based stages, and I have stages for AMD64,
i486, i586 and i686.  I'd like to do the same with musl.
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.