[BusyBox] Compile for a different platform

Paul Farber farber at admin.f-tech.net
Wed Oct 16 16:02:06 UTC 2002


This one gets a lot of people (it got me).

Most preinstalled libs installed during install process are 'specialy 
optimized' for 686s.. actaully I think its the CMOV command that does not 
exist on 486 PC.

Symptom:  The kernal boots (because you were a good little hacker and 
selected the proper CPU type from the list) but stops at init (because 
init is calling '686 optimized' libs that you copied from your 
workstation).

Cure:  (for RedHat at least) do not to use the 'standard' libs but use 
the 'other ones' that are on the CD.  Don;t ask me for verion/RPM numbers 
cause they are probibly different from what I used from RH 7.3.  do an rpm 
-qa | grep glibc, get the glibc version and pull the RPM for the 486 
version from the CD.

After that my little test soekris net4501 booted and worked flawlessly.

-- 
Paul Farber
Farber Technology
farber at admin.f-tech.net
Ph  570-628-5303
Fax 570-628-5545

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Willem Oldeman wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have an old 486 lying around that I want to get up using Busybox.
> On my Pentium I compiled a Linux kernel for it with support for a NatSemi 
> network card.
> Next I compiled Busybox, telling gcc "-march=i486 -mcpu=486".
> 
> The kernel loaded fine from a bootdisk, yet, when I fed it the rootdisk with 
> busybox, the thing just died (well, characters echoed, but nothing more).
> Feeding the same disks to my Pentium, they both loaded and then started 
> complaining about not finding some /dev devices. That was a lot better, but 
> the 486 would come alive.
> 
> After a lot of fiddeling (> 1 month, yo - I'm really bright) I all of a sudden 
> got a bright idea. Even though I configured the Busybox Makefile to create a 
> static binary, it will include GLIBC stuff, which was originally compiled for 
> my Pentium machine, with Pentium optimization flags.
> 
> So, am I on the right track? (I'll get the 486 down to the livingroom again if 
> I am). And: If I recompile glibc with 486 settings, is there an easy trick to 
> install the libraries somewhere else? I don't want it to interfere with my 
> regular glibc. E.g. can I safely use something like --prefix=/my/486/stuff 
> when compiling?
> Also, do I need to set things up so that the kernel headers for the 486 
> compilation can be found?
> 
> TIA,
> Willem (stupid dutchman)
> 
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> 




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