Re: [microblaze-uclinux] uClinux finally works

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ivan,

Ivan wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> finally I incresase the RAM memory of my board to 4 MBytes (my board has
> 8 MBytes but I use 4 MBytes to share data with the host), and uClinux
> works fine!!! 

excellent news
>>
>>How big is your busybox executable (it's in uClinux-dist/romfs/bin/busybox)?
>>
> Is about 221 Kbytes... is very big!!! :)

Yes, that does seem very big.  In my current setup, the busybox app is 
about 88Kbyte...

What was the result of running mb-flthdr on busybox?  I doubt very much 
whether it is compressed, at that size...

If have this in my /vendors/Insight/mbvanilla_net/Makefile, under the 
"image:" target:

         for i in $(ROMFSDIR)/bin/* ; do \
                 $(CROSS)flthdr -z $$i; \
         done

It just goes through and compresses all of the binaries, usually down to 
about 50%.  The kernel automatically uncompresses them at load time.


> Your asnswer is very interesting for me, because I have another small
> platform based on Spartan II with 2MB of RAM memory and 2MB of flash
> memory, and i want to use uClinux on it.

OK.  Should be feasible, but you will need to really trim things down.
> 
> Now, i try to design a basic Ethernet board, because my platforms don't
> have it. The network capability of uClinux is needed for me :)

Yesterday, just for an experiment, I tried building the Samba supprt and 
applications.  It worked immediately, I was able to mount our intranet 
Samba share on my microblaze uClinux box!  This sort of interoperability 
is what makes uClinux so powerful.

> John, all the tools available in the uClinux-dist works over MicroBlaze
> or is neccesary to port them???

AFAIK most of them are uClinux-safe, meaning they've been modified not 
to use fork() and so on.  There are a few exceptions, usually you should 
just try them and see, or ask on the uclinux-dev mailing list (subscribe 
via www.uclinux.org).

Of those that have been "ported" to uClinux, they usually work just fine 
on Microblaze.  Just enable them in the user config, make dep, and make.

This is for "normal" tools - low level ones like gdbserver for example 
are strongly architecture dependent, so more work is required there. But 
the standard file system stuff, web server, networking apps etc - they 
work fine.

Regards,

John

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