[olpc-software] How fast does it take to write a system from a scratch?

[Ronald G Minnich]

Tom M wrote:
>>The trick is to get at least restore from USB storage able to be in the
>>boot flash; I don't mind so much if we have to put TCP/IP and wireless
>>modules into a partition on the regular flash.   And if we can get it
>>all to fit into less than 512K bytes (BIOS + Linux as bootloader), then
>>we get to save  $.3 to $.5, which over the number of units we're
>>building, is more than small change.
> 
> 
> Is there some way to get that point to the general kernel hackers
> community?  Would the kernel mailing list be appropriate to
> communicate such information to the larger community?  While we have
> many extraordinarily knowledgable individuals on this list, there is
> always a chance of finding someone who has either done this or similar
> work before, or who has the skills necessary to help.

there's a lot of work ongoing on tiny kernels. YH Lu at AMD has done 
some testing and it seems we can jam a kernel into < 400k. This is of 
great interest in the linuxbios community, and will probably help olpc.

ron