[Freedombox-discuss] Size of the the base image

[Hector Oron]

Hello Lorenzo,

2011/2/26 Lorenzo <lorenzo at usucapio.net>:

> The first thing I did was to play a bit with EmDebian to try to understand
> how small it can get.

Great! :-)

> I've built two images using multistrap with EmDebian Grip and a Baked
> EmDebian Grip (using
> the demo repo published on the site) for the i386 architecture.

Both distros have different purposes. As I understand we want an
upgradeable freedombox (Grip), opposed to a system with hardcoded
pre-configurations and non-upgradeable (Baked).

> The size of the Grip install (with no optional packages) was of ~ 40 MB
> (using clean=true).
> The size of the Baked grip install (built using packages=dash) was of ~ 25
> MB.
>
> They seem a bit big compared to other embedded distros. As a comparison a
> buildroot
>  image can fit in 4MB.

They target different user/device requirements. Grip, Baked and
buildroot are not competing projects, those have different goals.

> My question, for the people who know EmDebian well, do you think EmDebian
> could be a good base distribution
> for the freedombox?

IMO, yes, EmDebian Grip could be a good base, as it uses Debian as a
base and keeps binary compatibility and configuration. It is just a
fat-free upgradeable Debian. So, I would recommend to base in Debian,
whatever that is in Debian could land on EmDebian Grip.

> Can the images be made smaller?

Probably not, maybe by using compression mechanisms on the images.

> From what I understand
>  from the website
> Crush is discontinued, and I read a mail in the emdebian mailing list there
> is no Grip for i386-ulibc.

Crush (cross compiled Debian source without coreutils, perl, ... which
breaks binary compatibility with Debian) development was dropped for
Squeeze, as there was no way to develop, support, maintain with the
small base of developers EmDebian has for Squeeze. That is likely to
change for the next Debian release as Crush development heavily
depends on multiarch implementation which it is a work-in-progress at
the moment, but Debian recently got support on APT and toolchain tools
to be multiarch aware, currently Debian is testing the good work done
on dpkg side, which are really good news.

> The other question is for the people with experience in embedded
> programming. Does the size of
> Grip (40MB) for the base system look excessive for a freedombox? Is it
> really necessary to build something
> smaller?

Nowadays memory is very cheap, I would not constrain the size of the
freedom box to a "router" size device (~16MB). Freedombox image could
surely be made smaller but not with "being Debian (pure) Blend"
constrain. I would at least expect to be able to run Debian and at
least have 512MB Flash if no more.

> This size seems to be a problem if we want to target devices in the
> class of wireless
> routers but should we target them in the first place? (this question is
> probably for the whole list)

Targetting Debian (with upgradeability and configurations) and
targetting router devices at once is not possible nowadays. A plug
computer or nettop makes much more sense to me.

Best regards,
-- 
 Héctor Orón

"Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar
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