Re: Linux under 8MB

["Pedro Venda (SYSADM)" <pjvenda@rnl.ist.utl.pt>]

On Thursday 18 August 2005 22:11, Imanpreet Arora wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>               For the last couple of days, I have been trying to set
> up linux kernel under 8MB. So far I have set up a linux 2.4.31, which
> just works under 8MB. However, I would be grateful if someone could
> help with the following queries

hi,

what do you mean 8MB? RAM or storage space? what do you intend to acomplish 
with such project?

I've been working on something simillar. I've been able to create a micro 
distro which runs from a floppy disk (kernel+initrd.gz+bootloader<=1.44MB) 
and boots well with as low as 5MB of RAM (tested with qemu). The kernel I've 
used was 2.6.9, but 2.6.12 should work as well.

> a)          Is linux2.4 just the right option? What about linux 2.0.x?
> Or for that matter even <2.0

2.6 has serious advantage over others when considering embedded environments 
(not sure if it applies to you)

> b)          What are the specific issues that are to be considered
> while compiling an old kernel on a newer setup? I ask this because I
> compiled my current setup on a 2.6.11 machine and while doing "make
> modules_install", I got errors from depmod[%], complaining about
> depmod.old.  I had to kludge my way through by setting up a link from
> depmod.old to depmod.

I did use uClibc and busybox (crosso compiled and linked to uClibc) to keep 
the distro as small as possible. (see buildroot from the maker of uClibc and 
busybox)

regards,
-- 

Pedro João Lopes Venda
email: pjvenda < at > rnl.ist.utl.pt
http://arrakis.dhis.org

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