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Comment by drran | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't want. I want to use mature distro, with thousands of packages, with known bugs fixed, with fresh software, like Fedora.

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This comment doesn't make any sense to me - it's like responding to an article titled "So, you want to build a transistor radio from scratch?" with "No, I want the latest iPod Touch".

There are lots of embedded systems beefy enough that Fedora is an appropriate choice.

Not really. Fedora IoT only supports x86_64, aarch64, and armhfp, which has some intersection with this space, but not a lot.

Regardless, that wasn't really the point of the article.

There is lots of embedded that uses x86 or arm. Lots of embedded isn't significantly power or size constrained and volumes are very low so software development costs dominate over hardware costs.

But agreed, those aren't the point of the article.

"Embedded" is a big space.

Something that is not power nor size constrained doesn't really fit most people's definition of "Embedded."

Example: the computer in a CNC machine.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Article title doesn't contain "from scratch", so I will rewrite your example as "So, you want to build AM radio?" and my response will be "No, I want to build FM radio, because of tons of FM radio stations available to listen".

The article isn't even close to being about building a linux distribution. It's about embedded electronics engineers moving from microcontrollers with custom embedded firmware to SBCs using minimal linux for embedded systems. So accepting your revision, the response would be "no, I want to buy a stereo system".

Well you can have that, those are the repositories mostly, which you have access to when building your linux. So you have a mature source of code, but what makes a distro 'mature' isn't really of any value in the embedded space. Kernel, core utils, init system, some packages and you custom code, and your done. You now have your own distro, code is mature, boots really fast and is probably more stable and secure that the mature distro which is trying to be everything under the sun. When you only need the linux to do one specific thing you can make something that is really rock solid and actually have a sense of everything that is going on under the hood. Having some guy whose, honestly mostly uneducated, solution is to just throw fedora on there is going to create a crap system.

Um .... OpenWRT?

Yep. Good choice for systems with 16-64Mb of RAM.

You want "to use mature distro, with thousands of packages, with known bugs fixed, with fresh software, like Fedora." on an embedded system. Really?

Yep. I used Fedora and Yocto on iMX6 SoloLite. Both use rpm&dnf. Fedora is much better. In fedora, I feel like at desktop: everything is the same, zero issues. In yocto, I feel like I returned in time for about 20 years: same f*ing bugs, which I reported or fixed years ago, again and again.

It really depends on your hardware, there are many systems with limited storage and memory where Fedora is impossible to fit. I do believe Yocto is the Gentoo for embedded linux, which is over-engineered to hell. The good news is that, unless you have some very special requirement, just use buildroot, which is 1/100 of the complexity and get the job done well. KISS.

Using a package manager on an embedded system is just asking for trouble. Or read-write rootfs, for that matter.

I usually have a r/o rootfs as squashfs with overlayfs for changes. It makes it easy to wipe things back to factory defaults.

Then you want a small desktop system, not an embedded one.

What wrong with that? My first Linux (SuSE) system had 16MB of RAM. I successfully compiled X on it in just few days. Why I should use outdated software on embedded chip with say 256MB of LPDDR?

What does it have to do with outdated software? You still use kernel version and userspace libraries of your choice - arguably more flexibly and up to date than on any mainstream distro.

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