Embedded linux resources

| I have been trying to find good resources whether on the web, or | books, to assist us in embedding linux on an x86 board. I did search | this group first before posting, and did not find what I am looking | for. In particular, we are looking to place linux on a read-only | partition on a flash card, so as to minimize the liklihood of | corrupting the system. Anyone have suggestions for sites and/or books | to help on this subject.

How big is the flash card? How big is the system?

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|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org)  /  Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net   /  spamtrap-2007-02-20-1625@ipal.net |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|

Just released the 14th version of Embedded Slackware SDK.

- i486 or pxa255

- script driven

- full Documentation

Auto creates component selectable filesystem and bootstraps (32MB - 1 GB) USB mounted compact flash.

For more info visit

There are 10 types of people in this world, those that read binary and those who don't!

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/ __|\\// __|| \ __ __ / snipped-for-privacy@sysdev.org \__ \ \/\__ \||)|/ O_)\/ / \/ System Tools / Utilities |___/ || ___/|_ /\___|\_/ WIntel / Linux Device Drivers

512MB flash card, currently 256MB SDRam, but could be more if we need to, not hurting for space with our current Linux build. As I said, largely looking for suggestions about decent books and/or websites for information on how to go about setting this up.

-- Richard

Thanks, will take a look when the website is accessible.

-- Richard

I did it by setting up a minimum Linux on a desktop PC and using strace and lsof to home in on anything writing out of place.

Decide on how you wish to setup the partitions - I had the flash card as the root filesystem (/) - a ramdisk as /tmp another ramdisk as /var/log and a read/write data partion for configuration and data.

I wrote two very simple shell scripts (if you can call them that) and placed then in /bin one called "rw" one called "ro" (mostly because I forget the syntax of mount and this saves typing)

# cat /bin/ro mount -n -o remount,ro / # cat /bin/rw mount -n -o remount,rw /

Boot the system - play around in read/write mode, when you make changes change the shells working directory away from /

#cd /tmp

now make the system read only

#ro

now run stuff - see what breaks by using strace and lsof to see what is trying to write outside of /

Then put it back to read/write

#cd /tmp #rw

Fix things, repeat until done !

I don't think you will find what your looking for in a book.

Jon

Richard,

I'm currently beginning work embedding Linux on an Atmel chip and came across a few e-books regarding embedded Linux development on an Atmel FTP server - ftp://at91dist:distrib@81.80.104.162/AT91_Third_Party_Design_Flow/Linux_Host/Doc . I haven't had a chance to read any of them yet, so I'm not sure of the exact content matter, but it may help a bit. Also, O'Reilly has made some of their books available to be read online at

.

Hope this helps, Alex

The website has not been accessible at all, is there a mirror somewhere?

-- Richard

Sorry, at the time my ISP went belly-up. Getting an adequate substitute was a headache, but finally found someone that knows how to give good http: sonic.net

The 2 above links should now work! TonyB

There are 10 types of people in this world, those that read binary and those who don't!

-- __ __ _ I N C.

/ __|\\// __|| \ __ __ / snipped-for-privacy@sysdev.org \__ \ \/\__ \||)|/ O_)\/ / \/ System Tools / Utilities |___/ || ___/|_ /\___|\_/ WIntel / Linux Device Drivers