[Clfs-dev] Embedded: Is e2fsprogs really needed in core embedded book?

[Andrew Bradford]

>
> I am trying to make an embedded NAS device and want to have e2fsprogs on
> my machine.
>

Cool!  Can you share info about it?


> But, being new to CLFS, I thought the book was small because it was
> unfinished and didn't actually know about the huge number of programs in
> the beyond section until I stumbled upon it by mistake through google.
>

For embedded, the "beyond" section is in the book.  It's where dropbear,
iptables, libnl, and hostapd live.  The CBLFS packages at
cblfs.cross-lfs.org are, in my opinion, more intended for the regular book.

The embedded book is small partly because it's a bit of a work in progress,
but also because BusyBox provides quite a lot of the core functionality
required and because most embedded systems need to fit in small quantities
of flash memory.  The embedded landscape spans a huge variety of storage
media sizes, for example, the WRT54GL router only has 4MB of flash, some
newer routers have _HUGE_ capacities of 32MB, and my BeagleBoard-xM has a
4GB SD card.  The book should be able to be made to work for all of those
sizes (32MB is easily done with the present book, 4MB would require getting
rid of e2fsprogs and paring down BusyBox).

I'd like to expand the embedded book's "beyond" section, either by simply
adding more packages to the book or adding on to the CBLFS wiki, but that's
not yet a priority for me.  Particularly, I'd like to have some info in the
book about how to set up CLFS and a packaging system (like dpkg and apt) so
that someone could build their own distribution for an embedded device and
deploy updates in the field.


> So my suggestion is to have link and endorsement of the beyond website
> more prominently in the book, perhaps in the introduction to installing
> the system software (Chapter 7.1)
>
> eg.
> Only the core packages are installed in this section. Instructions for
> installing many additional packages are available at the Beyond Cross
> Linux from Scratch website (http://cblfs.cross-lfs.org/) and other sites
> (see Section 14.4 What Now for additional resources)
>

This could be a good idea, provided there's an easy way to determine which
packages will actually work on the embedded build.  Regular CLFS has quite a
different set of packages and thus some basic dependencies may not be met as
easily with the embedded build.  If you've successfully built any of the
CBLFS packages for your embedded system, please let me know.  I'm not sure
if there's a good way to indicate a package works with embedded on the CBLFS
wiki.  If there is, update that too, please.


> Also, in section 14.4 What Now - the beyond link is to the BLFS and not
> to CBLFS site. Both sites are useful when searching for instructions for
> adding additional packages.


Thanks for pointing this out, I'll fix it.

-Andrew
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