small replacement for emerge for live package-management?

Hi everyone,

Are there any pointers for a light(er) weight package manager for 
embedded devices with <= 16 MB of flash storage ?

I've grown accustomed to using emerge to build binary packages for all 
of my boards. Up until now we've just blasted the binary packages onto 
our boards in the shop, but we're turning towards updates on live 
systems in the field.

Paludis has struck my interest but I'm just not sure what the runtime 
requirements are, and how well it deals with normal gentoo binary tbz2's 
(and their metadata). I think that libstdc++.so is a bit too big for our 
boards, so any options with C++ dependencies are likely out the door.

Having python on our boards is not really an option either, and 
therefore the factory 'emerge' also won't work (or will it??).

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure that some of you have dealt 
with the same problem before.

Cheers,

Chris

Re: small replacement for emerge for live package-management?

Something like iPkg is ideal because it was built specifically for this 
purpose - but I really have no interest in switching do a Debian based 
distro.

Christopher Friedt wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Are there any pointers for a light(er) weight package manager for 
> embedded devices with <= 16 MB of flash storage ?
> 
> I've grown accustomed to using emerge to build binary packages for all 
> of my boards. Up until now we've just blasted the binary packages onto 
> our boards in the shop, but we're turning towards updates on live 
> systems in the field.
> 
> Paludis has struck my interest but I'm just not sure what the runtime 
> requirements are, and how well it deals with normal gentoo binary tbz2's 
> (and their metadata). I think that libstdc++.so is a bit too big for our 
> boards, so any options with C++ dependencies are likely out the door.
> 
> Having python on our boards is not really an option either, and 
> therefore the factory 'emerge' also won't work (or will it??).
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure that some of you have dealt 
> with the same problem before.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris

Re: small replacement for emerge for live package-management?

Hey,

Natanael Copa wrote a convert script for tbz2 -> apkg (alpinelinux.org).
Converting to ipkg is also possible if you make some changes to the script.

Cheers
--
flip

Christopher Friedt schrieb:
> Something like iPkg is ideal because it was built specifically for this 
> purpose - but I really have no interest in switching do a Debian based 
> distro.
> 
> Christopher Friedt wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Are there any pointers for a light(er) weight package manager for 
>> embedded devices with <= 16 MB of flash storage ?
>>
>> I've grown accustomed to using emerge to build binary packages for all 
>> of my boards. Up until now we've just blasted the binary packages onto 
>> our boards in the shop, but we're turning towards updates on live 
>> systems in the field.
>>
>> Paludis has struck my interest but I'm just not sure what the runtime 
>> requirements are, and how well it deals with normal gentoo binary 
>> tbz2's (and their metadata). I think that libstdc++.so is a bit too 
>> big for our boards, so any options with C++ dependencies are likely 
>> out the door.

Re: small replacement for emerge for live package-management?

On Sun, 2008-02-03 at 15:30 +0100, Christopher Friedt wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Are there any pointers for a light(er) weight package manager for 
> embedded devices with <= 16 MB of flash storage ?
> 
> I've grown accustomed to using emerge to build binary packages for all 
> of my boards. Up until now we've just blasted the binary packages onto 
> our boards in the shop, but we're turning towards updates on live 
> systems in the field.
> 
> Paludis has struck my interest but I'm just not sure what the runtime 
> requirements are, and how well it deals with normal gentoo binary tbz2's 
> (and their metadata). I think that libstdc++.so is a bit too big for our 
> boards, so any options with C++ dependencies are likely out the door.
> 
> Having python on our boards is not really an option either, and 
> therefore the factory 'emerge' also won't work (or will it??).
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure that some of you have dealt 
> with the same problem before.

Having has the same need myself I wrote in c a util called qmerge.
qmerge is apart of portage-utils. portage-utils provides applets much in
the same way as busybox does that can be disabled at compile time.
qmerge only deals with gentoo based binary.tbz2 files. 

# Setup basic embedded ROOT...

Re: small replacement for emerge for live package-management?

Ned, can I just say something quickly ...

You're awesome !

That's exactly what I was looking for 

At some point a long time ago I used qmerge on my old desktop machine 
but I completely forgot that it existed !! I think that was even before 
I started working with arm boards 

Ned Ludd wrote:
> Few notes.. These can be mounted by the embedded device as a tmpfs.
> $ROOT/usr/portage/packages/ var/tmp/portage. You can/should delete the
> contents in there on embedded devices.
> 
> 1) Never make/allow qmerge to touch the libc
> 2) Never make/allow qmerge to touch the *busybox*/bin/sh..
> 
> Final note.. It's still an applet in development. If you find a bug in
> it. I'd much would rather have a patch that fixes it up vs a bugzilla
> entry telling me whats wrong with it. Good luck.

Thank you! Will do,

Chris

How do you build your systems?

Hi,

I'm currently working on an x86 based embedded system, first i builded
the environment manually, currently i'm working on a script which reads
an inifile and builds the system according to it. I had a look at
catalyst and gnap. But gnap seems to be unmaintained for quite some time
now. And Catalyst is heavily focused on the whole livecd idea.

What do you use?

Nico

Re: How do you build your systems?

Re: How do you build your systems?

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 02:02:27AM +0100, Nico Erfurth wrote:
> What do you use?

catalyst and stage4 spec files. Does the job fine!

//Peter

Re: How do you build your systems?

* Nico Erfurth <ne@...> schrieb:

Hi,

> What do you use?

I've got my own embedded/cross buildsystem (called "Briegel"). 
It has almost as long history as ebuild/emerge, it can fetch
and build whole distros completely automatically, but there
are some fundamental differences:

* it's *ALWAYS* crosscompiling (there is no native build)
* it can produce lots of different binpkg formats
* instead of "useflags" we've got feature switches
* package profiles are simple property lists, instead of shell 
  scripts (which also makes it *much* faster than emerge).
* tarballs and patches are fetched from distro-agnostic sources
  (CSDB and OSS-QM)

Briegel is an commercial (non-OSS) product, but you may get an
free evolution copy. Feel free to contact me personally, if
you're interested.

cu
--

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
 	http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
 Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
	http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------

SPI & ARM9

Hello,

I've just been reading about the SPI support in the 2.6.24 kernel:

http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_24

Here is some introductory background on SPI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Peripheral_Interface_Bus

Does anyone have a testbed where the processor on their embedded board
is using the SPI port?

Has anyone use a 2.6.24 kernel to utilize the new SPI support to
communicate with any other hardware?

Any examples are appreciated.

James