[Freedombox-discuss] Size of the the base image
Lorenzo
lorenzo at usucapio.net
Sat Feb 26 18:59:27 UTC 2011
Hello,
To try to get a bit practical today I tried to setup a guide to assemble
a base image from
which the freedombox firmware can be developed (by adding more packages
and properly
configuring them).
The first thing I did was to play a bit with EmDebian to try to
understand how small it can get.
I've built two images using multistrap with EmDebian Grip and a Baked
EmDebian Grip (using
the demo repo published on the site) for the i386 architecture.
The size of the Grip install (with no optional packages) was of ~ 40 MB
(using clean=true).
The size of the Baked grip install (built using packages=dash) was of ~
25 MB.
They seem a bit big compared to other embedded distros. As a comparison
a buildroot
image can fit in 4MB.
I'm not an expert in emdebian nor in embedded programming, for this
reason I write to the list before
continuing.
My question, for the people who know EmDebian well, do you think
EmDebian could be a good base distribution
for the freedombox? Can the images be made smaller? From what I
understand from the website
Crush is discontinued, and I read a mail in the emdebian mailing list
there is no Grip for i386-ulibc.
The other question is for the people with experience in embedded
programming. Does the size of
Grip (40MB) for the base system look excessive for a freedombox? Is it
really necessary to build something
smaller? This size seems to be a problem if we want to target devices in
the class of wireless
routers but should we target them in the first place? (this question is
probably for the whole list)
Best Regards,
Lorenzo
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