OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: OpenEmbedded?

The content of this topic has been archived on 1 Mar 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

A friend with a Zaurus pointed out  OpenEmbedded (more detailed blurb) - a project to produce a more coherant build system than the mess of customised buildroots that are currently used for embedded Linux development. At the moment the focus appears to be on ARM PDAs, but they do mention that they're interested in supporting router development. The system was designed to support multiple target and host architectures cleanly - even Windows eventually - and to look like something between Gentoo's Portage and the current buildroot system they've been using for Open Zaurus.

Perhaps this would be worth looking into as a build system for future versions of OpenWRT? Less duplication of effort is always nice, and buildroot is just a little hairy.

Feature list
Approximate build system design
Newsletter discussing status as of June

I recently found out about this project...

http://openembedded.org/

4G-Systems are now using OpenEmbedded as the base for their MeshCube - which is a MIPS-based wireless router box.

I think there are many advantages to getting an OpenEmbedded-based version of OpenWRT running - I'm assuming that packages made for OpenEmbedded could run on a WRT also running OpenEmbedded.  Since the MeshCube is using it, the WRT could use the same packages, and vise versa.

Also, it would standardise the directory and file structure, which at the moment is a problem with OpenWRT - it's hard to build packages when there's not much in the way of an initialisation-script file structure.  Basically using OpenEmbedded would get the WRT's operating system more out into the mainstream, making it easier to use and develop (and package) for.

As soon as I'm finished (and can release) the next OpenEmbedded Release for the Siemens SIMpad then my next goal will be to complete the already begun integration of the wrt54g into OpenEmbedded ;-)

cmartin, thanks and kudos to you for all the good work that you are doing with open embedded!

cheers,
-Manu
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Manu Garg
http://manugarg.freezope.org
"Truth will free you"

Hi,

it is likely that OpenEmbedded will never run on plain WRT54g devices. Recent experiments made by Berlin OE devs with a uLibc based nylon shows, that there will be eventually a chance to implement OE for the WRT54gs devices. This is mainly caused by space requirements of OE dists. This is the chance for OpenWRT to stay for the G devices until the crowds will walk on to the next generation devices one day.

Regards, Sven-Ola

Hi Sven,

Any idea how much Flash space an OE-based WRT54GS distribution would take up?  Hopefully there will be some space left for a useful writable JFFS2 partition...

Cheers,
Dan

Hi Dan,

not really until the first version. As a personal estimate I think between 4-6 Mb, so it will leave around 3 Mb for jffs2. But we need to wait until the first version is ready anyway...

Rgds, Sven-Ola

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