The Holy Grail (of computing?)

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Sep 6 11:23:43 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 05 September 2007 3:40:39 am Carl SHAW wrote:
> > I don't use buildroot at all.  Lots of other projects (like Gentoo
> > Embedded or my own Firmware LInux) use uClibc but not buildroot.
>
> I agree with that - I work in the commercial embedded Linux market and
> most people I'm aware of in it actually use an embedded distribution
> containing uClibc that isn't based on buildroot.  We produce our own
> embedded distribution (ST Linux) mainly for the SH4.  Our customers seem
> to like "packaged" software rather than one great big tarball (or most
> of them anyway).

If I could get an emulator that ran sh4 code, I'd happily add sh4 as a 
supported target of FWL.  Unfortunately, qemu doesn't do it yet...

> > The embedded market uses uClibc heavily.  I don't consider it restricted
> > to that though, it's a nice fit for bootable CD distros (where an extra
> > megabyte or two of free space is still noticed), and in general it's nice
> > to have a simple, readable C library.  (Being tied to a single
> > implementation is bad.)
>
> The embedded market is strange - because ram is relatively cheap and
> performance is an issue, a lot of embedded systems still use glibc (e.g.
> Maemo).  What we have found recently is that more of our customers are
> now using our uClibc (or migrating to it) since we wrote our uClibc NPTL
> support.  I guess they are finding less glibc/uClibc differences or
> better thread performance now with their multi-threaded apps?  Our next
> distribution release will have all our packages (about 400) in both
> glibc and uClibc versions.  The hype around GPLv3 may also have had some
> impact in the commercial world.

Ram is cheap but flash isn't, and cheap != long battery life. :)

People keep saying how embedded's getting bigger and nobody needs to worry 
about saving a few kilobytes here and there anymore.  Personally, I await the 
day that cereal boxes on grocery store shelves have a display covering the 
front of the box, updated every 30 seconds or so, costing about as much and 
consuming about as much power as the little "blinky LED" things that were so 
faddish about 5 years ago.  When your budget for the entire device is in 
the "free toy inside" range and it has to run for months off of a battery 
small enough to be landfilled without environmental lawsuits, an extra 256k 
is noticeable.

> > Rob
>
> Carl

Still Rob.

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.



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