[CentOS-devel] Using Centos as embedded linux.

Wed Jan 16 15:46:17 UTC 2008
Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh at wantstofly.org>

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 11:44:54AM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:

> > > > > If you need something much smaller (or a non-supported
> > > > > platform like ARM), I'd suggest looking at Busybox or a
> > > > > BSD operating system.
> > > > 
> > > > I work on the Fedora ARM port, and we just released a
> > > > n(unofficial) F8 for ARM:
> > > 
> > > Fedora is too fast moving a target to really considering
> > > worth while implementing device grade </opinion>
> > 
> > I'm sorry, what do you mean?  That didn't quite parse on my end. :)
> 
> the shelf life of Fedora, as a release, is too short to consider 
> implementing in a device role. Not sure whats unclear about that ?

I wasn't sure what you meant by 'device grade'.

I made the remark about the Fedora/ARM port and CentOS because of
someone noting that ARM was an unsupported CentOS platform.

For one, I don't think the assumption that 'ARM == embedded stuff
only' is valid anymore -- as I noted earlier, the horsepower of ARM
CPUs has been increasing steadily, and they are starting to pop up
in small laptop-like devices and such.  I.e. in places where you
don't generally need 5yr or 10yr software support cycles.

As to Fedora moving too quickly, we're probably not going to agree
on that topic :-), but one argument is that if you're going to keep
your software mostly frozen during a 6-12 month device development
cycle, it's nice if what you start off with isn't entirely outdated
already.  I.e. if you base off something that revs quickly, it lets
_you_ decide when to freeze, instead of being stuck to some every-
two-years release cycle of your upstream Linux vendor.  YMMV.

Also, the Fedora/ARM port isn't an end goal as such, but should be
seen in the light of what other things it enables (e.g. other
mini-distributions based off Fedora, maybe a CentOS port at some
point (as Fedora _is_ more or less the upstream for RHEL), etc.)

Finally, for the ARM architecture to become more broadly accepted,
IMHO we should ideally be in a situation where everything that runs
on Linux/x86 should also run on Linux/ARM -- and that includes the
prominent Linux distros.