Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > Hello, > > Some newbies get caught by our advertisement (which might be true for older > versions of LFS, but is untested as of LFS-6.3): > >> It is not difficult to build an LFS system of less than 100 megabytes (MB), >> which is substantially smaller than the majority of existing installations. >> Does this still sound like a lot of space? A few of us have been working on >> creating a very small embedded LFS system. We successfully built a system >> that was specialized to run the Apache web server with approximately 8MB of >> disk space used. Further stripping could bring this down to 5 MB or less. Try >> that with a regular distribution! This is only one of the many benefits of >> designing your own Linux implementation.
The above is still true, but perhaps there should be a modification: "It is not difficult to modify a standard LFS system to use less than 100 megabytes (MB)..." This can be done easily by removing /usr/share, /usr/include and perhaps a few other files. Getting it down to less than 50M takes a little more work, but is not that hard. Of course, the lower you go, the more knowledge it takes. > ...and attempt to build LFS on their slow 586-class computers with only 16 MB > of > RAM. This is obviously a waste of time, both for them and for us. > Additionally, > the mentioned 100 MB system obviously contains significant deviations from > the > book and thus cannot be counted as LFS. I can't find anywhere where the book refers to a slow 586-class system. The SBU section already says that "Glibc .. could take up to three days on slower systems!" > P.S. I accept the challenge to "try that with a regular distribution". I am waiting for your results. Can you do it without breaking updates via their package manager? > Proposal: > > 1) Remove this advertisement. Disagree. It is still valid, but could use some tweaks. > 2) List hardware requirements (CPU, RAM, hard disk space) on the same page as > software host requirements, or immediately before it. These requirements > should > be set so that the total build time (including all testsuites) is less than 8 > hours, and that the build process never needs to get into swap (the worst > case > seems to be Chapter 5 gcc Pass1 when starting from a host that is based on > gcc-3.3). Disagree. The SBU page already can give a user an idea about how long it takes for various combinations of hardware. A user can judge for himself from there. Again, the SBU page could use some updates. > 3) When package management enters the book, include a procedure for building > packages for a lower CPU (basically, import config.site from the LiveCD and > adjust toolchain and perl configure arguments as done there) and transferring > LFS and subsequent packages to a different machine. Disagree. This is something for a hint or something similar to the user notes on BLFS. Trying to address every corner case in the book would be distracting to the majority of users. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
