> I am about to port linux to an industryprocessor (i.e. of no real interest
> to anyone except the company) using a CPU, a small flash and max 32mb of
> RAM.
Well, I find it very interesting :-) And I'm sure other people
would like to be informed too, maybe a little web-page and one
or two free boards given to some local low-level linux geeks
can speed up development a lot and keeps people happy...
> My problem is what kernel to start from, since i only want a.out (for
> the sheer size of it) and don't need any device drivers (i will have to
> write them myself since it is very unusual hardware).
It depends. If the board has got an MMU, you should probably go for
a newer (2.0 or 2.1 kernel). If it hasn't, you should try uCLinux
(see webwatcher.org for URL).
There's not much reason to go for an early kernel, since the 500k
max you'll save is small compared to the size of memory and the
size of the app. The extra performance of the newer kernels is
probably worth more.
> I will have to mount
> the flash as rootdirectory (has this been done?), and maybe use a small
> RAM-disk for temporary files (RAM-disk is included in 2.0.xx, but in earlier
> i can't remember).
This has all been done before. There's nothing new and you
should get hundreds of hits on Altavista or Yahoo!.
> My other thought was security (since this linux will be
> used on network peripheral devices, and the syn-flood wasn't corrected until
> late 2.0.xx if i am right?
This is one of the primary reasons to totally forget about
1.2 or 2.0. Your project will most likely _not_ finish
before Linux 2.2 is out, so the 2.1 codebase will probably
be the best start (since 2.0 won't be maintained very much
when 2.2 comes out).
Of course, we're always ready to help you. We like new and
strange Linux ports as much as anything else...
Rik.
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