[Clfs-support] Looking Ahead

[Ken Moffat]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 03:56:38PM +0100, John wrote:
> This is my first clfs build.
> I have come to the end of  V.9. 
chapter 9 ?
> Everything has gone by the book so far. 
> Reading ahead there are a few things I would like to ask.
> 
> 
> 1. How big is clfs by the book?
>     In the V10 Stripping I read that one can reduce the size by 200MB.
>     I was not expecting it to be much bigger than 200MB.
> 
 Most software gets bigger with each release.  I'm assuming you are
using the trunk book - that aims to give you a useful system on
which you can build applications, either for a desktop or for a
server.  If you really want to compile as much as possible on a
faster machine, clfs-sysroot or clfs-embedded might be better (I
don't know, I've not tried either).
> 
> 2. I chose chroot. At what point in the book do I copy from host to target?
>     My target machine is minimal so I would prefer to stay on host as long as posible.
> 

 Before chapter 9.  If the host and target use _identical_
architectures, copying later might work, but is untested.  The
chroot method actually implies that the build is all done on one
machine, although I've certainly built chapters 5,6,8,9 on a fast
machine and then chapter 9 on a slower machine with an incompatible
architecture.
> 
> 3. I am planning to copy by putting the hard disk from target into host.
>     What problems am I letting myself in for?
> 

 I assume you'll make it the second disk - otherwise, you won't have
a kernel or bootscripts.  I'm also assuming that you know the disk
works on the target machine (I think really old bioses can only see
small disks).
> 
> 4. My target machine has 1GB hard disk and 4MB ram. 
>     The hard disk is in fact a flash memory.
>      Any problems here? 

 Possibly, using "proper" filesystems will wear the flash out fairly
quickly - at the least, mount with noatime.  I haven't seen people
documenting their use of "consumer-grade" flash memory, nor their
usage patterns, so I've no evidence.  When I was thinking of doing
something similar, I was going to use small tmpfs's for /tmp and
/home, and copy minimal files to them.  With 4MB RAM, that clearly
isn't a possibility.  It suggests a very old machine, so you might
encounter the "I think I built it for i{3,4,5}86 but it has included
some i686 instructions" problem if you build on the faster machine.

 Where will you put the swap (with 4MB you'll need swap even for a
shell login) ?  Flash memory isn't going to like being rewritten a
lot, although I have to admit that it will probably ignore any
partitions you think you've put onto it in deciding which sector to
write.

>     I am currently using Linux on this machine so it does work.
> 

ĸen
-- 
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce