Matt Denton wrote:Do you mean for the Vortex86DX? This may be simple to you, but if you could break things down step by step as I have tried to do in my initial post that would be great, e.g. links to the buildroot package etc....
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/download.html
Download site.
To build it, I strongly recommend using Linux on a PC.
On Debian or Ubuntu, you need to install some tools:
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apt-get install build-essential flex bison
Then download and unpack the buildroot package and type
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make menuconfig
in the buildroot directory. Configure everything to your liking (setting CPU type and keeping everything else at defaults would be a good start), exit, type "make" and it starts downloading neccessary source packages and compiling. Since the whole gcc/binutils/uclibc toolchain is built for the target architecture, this can take 2 hours on a current PC. However, the toolchain is only built once, so if you don't change critical settings, it's much faster on the second run.
After that, you'll end up with an ext2 image in binaries/uclibc/rootfs.ext2, this can be compressed and used as an initrd.
If it is the Vortex86DX you are building an image for, do you have a test platform, and how do you add DM&P's network driver into the package?
The above ext2 fs can also be mounted via loopback and you can copy files to (if you allocated enough space) and from it.
The network driver is kernel stuff only, since I intended to use the kernel image provided by DMP and not rebuild the kernel, there's no compiling neccessary. However, I just worked with monolithic kernels and buildroot until now and have to find a way to put in modutils and the modules from the DMP kernel. That's why I havn't uploaded the image yet.
Since x86 is x86 is x86, my plan was trying to boot the resulting image in a Parallels VM. It should work on a regular PC, if you use a regular kernel.
Practically almost everything architecture dependant is inside the kernel. If you get a kernel running, the only thing that matters for other binaries is that the CPU architecture itself is the same. An example: At the end of the 90s, I had Linux running on my Amiga, and for m68k Linux, everything except the kernel was the same for the Amiga and the Atari ST. Another example: binaries from Debian running on my Network Attached Storage box run on the Eddy module, since both have ARM9 CPUs.
