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Reorder forkbomb build so ./host-tools.sh gets built first. Then toybox utilities can be used to extract all the other packages (patch, bunzip, sha1sum, echo, eventually tar...) Motivated by a bug I encountered in gnu patch on Kubuntu 7.10 that's insisting linux-2.6.13-cmdline.patch is a reversed patch, when it isn't. (That patch has been happily applying for over a year now, and I examined it by hand. The bug's in the Ubuntu patch command. Not my problem.)
author Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
date Tue, 01 Jan 2008 03:08:29 -0600
parents 315f50aa7733
children 2966ed8d6803
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<b><h1>News</h1></b>

<h2>November 2, 2007</h2>
<p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.3.0.tar.bz2>Version 0.3.0</a> is out
(changeset 242), with kernel 2.6.23.  PowerPC finally works under
qemu (network and everything), and it's building a m68k target
(although I have no emulator to run that).  That means there are
ten targets, of which eight run under qemu.  (Sparc is still
broken, let me know if anybody actually cares.)</p>

<p>The new "./forkbomb.sh --fork" script builds all the targets in
parallel, or use --nofork if you haven't got the memory for that
(and --watch to watch and existing build if you ctrl-c out of
the display before it's done).</p>

<p>The build is now smarter about extracting only one copy of the
source code (in build/sources) and re-using it for multiple builds,
building out of tree (via cp -rs to create a tree full of symlinks
so the package doesn't need native out-of-tree support).</p>

<h2>September 2, 2007</h2>
<p>Added <a href=new_platform.html>a porting guide</a>.  I'm working on
m68k, ppc, big endian arm, and maybe blackfin targets for the next release,
and thought other people might be interested in the process.  (The vast
majority of it is fiddly debugging.  These are the other steps.)</p>

<h2>June 27, 2007</h2>
<p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.2.2.tar.bz2>Version 0.2.2</a> is out
(changeset 185).  Using uClibc 0.9.29 release, several small bugfixes,
new mips big-endian config, actually work when /bin/sh->dash (mostly
by explicitly saying /bin/bash everywhere), automatically detect
the number of CPUs in the machine to feed -j to make, and better
diagnostic output.</p>

<h2>April 9, 2007</h2>
<p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.2.1.tar.bz2>Version 0.2.1</a> is out
(changeset 156).  Significant upgrades to armv4l: the native compiler works
now, and it's using soft-float.  Added armv5l and i586 targets to show how
to do that kind of variant.  Added preliminary powerpc support (although
qemu can't run it yet).  Reorganized the download directory and rewrote
the <a href=downloads/README>README</a>.  Added squashfs back (the kernel
supports it, but it's not using it yet).  Moved uClibc to miniconfig.
(Yes, the patch for this is huge, and yes I need to push it all upstream into
the Linux kernel.  On the bright side, this one builds on a host that doesn't
have curses installed.)  Stopped trying to build qemu (at least until they
get the gcc 3.x dependencies cleaned out), now just warn if it's not there
(so far the build only uses it to sanity-test the cross compiler, which is
now skipped automatically if it's not there).</p>

<p>I note that some versions of Ubuntu (Edgy and up) are pushing a political
agenda.  They install bash, but point /bin/sh to dash instead.  (So why
install bash if you're not going to use it?)  This breaks all sorts of things,
and if somebody can tell me how to force make to run "/bin/bash" instead of
"/bin/sh", I'll consider trying to deal with the mess.  Until then, I suggest
"rm /bin/sh; ln -s bash /bin/sh" to get a working system.  (I'm no fan of
bash, but dash is just broken.)</p>

<p>(Those of you who use vi and want to be able to use the cursor keys while
in insert mode might want to do something similar with vi->vim.  Ubuntu seems
to be trying to train users to change their habits.  Dog biscuits would be a
more honest approach.)</p>

<p>Update: I've been pointed at
<a href=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh>this</a> as evidence Ubuntu isn't
pushing a political agenda.  Ok, maybe it's just really bad technical judgement.
Are they honestly saying that people write shell scripts for the speed?  And
how do you make a size argument and then install bash by default in ADDITION
to the other shell?  Boggle.  In 1991 after Linus Torvalds taught his term
program to understand the minix filesystem so he could upload and download
without rebooting, he taught it to handle the system calls of bash so he could
rm/mv/mkdir without rebooting.  That's where Linux 0.0.1
came from.  Bash was the default Linux shell _before_ 0.0.1.  Be very
careful messing with that kind of a de-facto standard, guys.  Dash is
garbage.  Background a process with &amp; and then hit ctrl-c: it'll kill it.
It doesn't understand blah/{blah,blah} file list syntax.  It can't do
"source file.sh" (just ". file.sh", which is unreadable).  I repeat: I'm not a
fan of bash (yeah, the bloat's getting crazy), but dash is broken.</p>

<p>And that still doesn't explain why "vi" can't use the cursor keys in
insert mode, but "vim" can...</p>

<h2>March 6, 2007</h2>
<p>Version 0.2.0 is out.  This one builds ext2 images which can boot up to a
shell prompt under qemu.  This works on i686, armv4l, x86_64, and mipsel.
(Sparc's broken.  Anyone who cares about sparc is welcome to debug it.)</p>

<p>There are now prebuilt ext2 image files in the download directory.
The kernels are in the mini-native tarballs.  (Yeah, I should repackage that
next release.)  The system emulator invocation for each platform is
the appropriate sources/configs file, and run-mini-native.sh invokes 'em.</p>

<p>The mailing list is in the usual place if you have any questions.</p>

<h2>January 14, 2007</h2>
<p>There's a new irc channel for the project, #firmware on freenode.</p>

<p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=88>Changeset 88</a> builds
i686, x86_64, armv4l, mips, and sparc.  I've made a release tarball of
that (<a href=downloads/firmware-0.1.1.tar.bz2>firmware 0.1.1</a>, "It works
for me"), and updated the prebuilt cross-compiler tarballs in the
<a href=downloads>downloads</a> directory.  I've added a big README and
prebuilt mini-native tarballs for each platform (although packing them up into
something qemu can boot is currently left as an exercise for the reader).</p>

<p>Speaking of which, I'm currently working on adding ext2 packaging
(via <a href=http://landley.net/code/toybox>toybox</a>) to the build scripts,
so qemu system emulation can boot the result and then run the next stage
automatically.</p>

<h2>December 28, 2006</h2>
<p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=68>Changeset 68</a> builds
a native build environment with a working toolchain.  And in celebration, I've
revamped the website with an actual navigation bar and content and such.</p>

<p>I should put out a release soon.</p>

<h2>December 5, 2006</h2>
<p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=27>Changeset 27</a> builds
a relocatable armv4l cross-compile toolchain!  Download the tarball,
run ./download.sh, then run ./build.sh, then grab the "build/cross-compiler"
directory and use "bin/armv4l-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc" out of that (which
I admit is a bit of a mouthful, for which I blame the FSF).</p>

<h2>August 6, 2006</h2>
<p>Mecurial repository created.  Nothing to see yet, move along...</p>
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