Baslinux mailing list

[3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org]

James Miller wrote:
>
> ... a special "tiny" version of the 2.6.x kernel ... a series 
> of patches designed to minimize the kernel's footprint, 
> I see they're continuing their work, having a set of patches 
> for a pretty recent release (2.6.2).  

I had a look at it, but there were two things that put me off.
First, I'm always reluctant to use a brand new kernel.  It 
normally takes a dozen revisions to get a solid kernel.  Second, 
some of the patches seem quite aggressive.  It would take a lot
of trial and error (and a lot of time) to determine which patches 
are worthwhile.  That double dose of risk is too much for me.  

The fastest/safest way to get BL3 out is too use the tried-and-
true libraries from BL1 and the tried-and-true kernel from BL2.
Once BL3 is up and running smoothly, we can have a look at 
improving the kernel and/or libraries.

I'm spending several hours each day on BL3.  It's starting to 
come together nicely, but there are still a lot of loose ends.  
I've just about finished the X stuff -- everything is less 
than 2mb (that includes Xvesa, X libs, fonts, wallpapers, wm, 
xterm, image viewer, clock, calculator, etc.).  I'm pretty sure 
that 4mb RAM will be able to run a reasonable Xterminal (using 
remote applications), but not local applications.  I've tried
running local applications on mem=4M and it swaps very heavily.

I'm using the latest busybox with BL3.  It includes several
new binaries: fdformat, unzip, bunzip, cal, udhcpc, strings,
httpd, and a few others.  If httpd works as expected, you'll
be able to transfer files between computers using links.

There will be several other new things in BL3 (including one
enormous surprise, which I am leaving for the first users to 
discover for themselves).

Everything is on target for release in March 2004.

Cheers,
Steven