I'm setting up a number of machines, sparcs, sparc64s, an RS6000, an m68k etc for netbooting an OS that runs off ramdisk, and runs network applications. One sparc64 server will be the tftp/rarpd/bootpd/dhcp etc server for the task.
So it all comes down to two OSes that are flexible enough: Linux and NetBSD.
I've been playing with Dan Kegel's crosstool tools, been monitoring the gcc cross compiling mailing list for ways to compile up a Linux system with uclibc to make things small enough, and have failed. Linux
2.4 with glibc is good enough for the job but a little large, and cross compiling has been generally a pain compared to NetBSD's build.sh. If the ramdisk image is expected to be 8MB, I'll need at least 8MB more for RAM for Linux, although NetBSD 1.6 can do with 4mb.Any thoughts on easier ways to cross compile linux with uclibc or newlib? Can linux with glibc be smaller than NetBSD if older versions or libc5 are used? Should I think of using kernel version 2.0? Will OpenBSD or FreeBSD be smaller than NetBSD?
Finally what is the most cross-compilable version of the Linux kernel, gcc, glibc and binutils? Is there such a combination that will cross-compile without any issues to all the Linux-supported arches?