[Toybox] A thought about toybox and IOT

[Rob Landley]

On 05/09/14 08:43, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 04:06:32PM -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
>> There were some interesting presentations at the recent ELC about systems
>> running with very low memory.  Particularly interesting were the talk about
>> micro-Yocto by Tom Zanussi and the talk about Linux on microControllers by
>> Vitaly Wool.  Talk slides are online at:
>> http://elinux.org/ELC_2014_Presentations
> 
> Speaking of micro-Yocto, this patch series got mentioned on Phoronix:
> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1405.0/index.html#02486
> (RFC: A reduced Linux network stack for small machines)
> It's a patch series used with micro-Yocto and tested by Tom Zanussi,
> that reduces size of the network stack to about 170k .text from 400k
> (at least when combined with LTO...they may  be able to improve that)
> Of course Dave Miller said "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no..."
> And there I found a link to github.com/tzanussi/linux-yocto-micro-3.14

Many moons ago, I pointed out the "strip down vs build up" jump we all
go through, and that we need a "hello world" kernel:

http://lists.celinuxforum.org/pipermail/celinux-dev/2010-January/000288.html

I periodically revisit the idea:

https://lwn.net/Articles/494449/

And the obviou way forward would be a public domain bootloader for all
the supported targets, to which we can start adding stuff.

I talked with Rich Felker about this at Ohio Linuxfest last year, and we
both noted that zero to usable takes about 3 years. (Linux making it to
1.0, musl making it to 1.0, tinycc making it to tccboot took less but
that's Fabrice bellard for you, and ~3 years of work total is my
ballpark estimate for the amount of full time work toybox 1.0 _should_
take, if I could work on it full time.)

So a new kernel, from somebody smart and energetic like @winocm (except
we've lost her to Apple), would probably take about 3 years to be 1.0
usable.

But I certainly don't have the time for it these days. Toybox comes
first, then building android under aboriginal linux, then doing qcc
(qemu tcg + tinycc), and _then_ maybe I'd have time to bang on something
like this...

Rob

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