'Re: XIP?'

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List:       linux-arm-kernel
Subject:    Re: XIP?
From:       Greg Ungerer <gerg () snapgear ! com>
Date:       2004-04-20 12:26:44
Message-ID: 40851704.3050909 () snapgear ! com
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Hi Matthias,

Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> On Monday 19 April 2004 19:22, Mark Beckwith wrote:
>>The target platform has 2M of flash and 2M of Ram.  From what I've read so
>>far about XIP on arm, its a lot of work and its not going to save me anyway
>>(its not a silver bullet).  So, do I have a prayer?  Any thoughts would be
>>appreciated.
> 
> That's quite tight ;) I'd say you have no chance to run a regular linux on 
> that platform, but uClinux might be a candidate. Try www.uclinux.org. Its 
> track record of running on very small machines is quite good.
> 
> XIP for ARM is not available as free software, but I heard of a commercial 
> version sold by the former RidgeRun people (not cheap, but affordable). 
> Wonder about the license, though.

XIP for the armnommu targets is available, has been for a while.
RidgeRun did shared libraries for non-MMU ARM targets, and that is
currently not freely available.

> Still, an uncompressed uClinux kernel uses up to 1M of memory, so you have to 
> squeeze the root filesystem into about 1M of flash memory. Uncompressed, due 
> to XIP. Probably enough for a single application and some devnodes.

Or much more :-)
Using the small libraries (uClibc for example) you can get a good number
of applications in a 1MB filesystem. Certainly enough to do some very
usefull things (even if you have to staticly link against libc).

Regards
Greg

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Greg Ungerer  --  Chief Software Dude       EMAIL:     gerg@snapgear.com
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