Difference between revisions of "Bering-uClibc 5.x"

Revision as of 17:19, 6 December 2011

Overview

Bering-uClibc is one of the branches of the LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Framework) project, delivering on LEAF's ambition to provide a secure, feature-rich, customizable embedded Linux network appliance for use in a variety of network topologies. Although it can be used in other ways, its primary goal is as a Internet gateway, BRAS, router, firewall and wireless access point.

Bering-uClibc-next is basically Bering-uClibc 4.x brought up to date with the latest versions of the main software components and with reworked toolchain. In particular:

• Toolchain is slightly reworked to support 'true' cross-compilation; also gcc was updated to 4.6.2.
• The Linux kernel is planned to be upgraded from 2.6.x to 3.x (current 4.0 version uses longterm 2.6.35 kernel branch).
• The uClibc library is upgraded from 0.9.30 to 0.9.32.

The main advantages are:

• Kernel-mode PPTP/L2TP/PPPoE server (accel-ppp) which is 'all-in-one' powerful BRAS daemon with shaper like BSD's mpd.
• Possibility to build binaries for any target platform which supports Linux

Main Features

The key characteristics of Bering-uClibc-next are:

• Based on a recent release of the Linux Kernel.
• Targetted to run on industry standard devices even with non-x86 processors.
• Designed to perform well on relatively low-specification hardware. In particular:
  • The system runs from an in-memory filesystem. Disk storage is only required for booting and for holding configuration settings.
  • The uClibc C library is used in place of the GNU C Library since uClibc is much smaller in size.
  • Considerable use is made of BusyBox utilities as replacements for larger applications.
• Focussed on providing excellent networking facilities.
• Designed to have high fault tolerance:
  • There is no writes on HDD/flash during work (except config saving during maintenance) - so power failure will not break file system.
  • Corrupted/erased config file, or even 'rm -rf /' isn't a problem - changes are stored permanently only when user requires that, and reboot will restore all as it was before.
  • Enabled by default watchdog, reboot on kernel panic and kernel soft-lockup detection will help to have minimum downtime of router.
  • Backup scripts will help to restore system state on storage failure/operator mistake.

Development History

First commit into new branch (updated toolchain) was made by Nitr0man in October, 29 2011. In Novemer 2011 most packages were updated to be correctly assembled with new toolchain. First working minimal system image was also assembled in November 2011. Currently branch is in pre-alpha stage, it looks enough stable for usage, but it is in active development phase, and many planned changes are still waiting when it's time will come.

Version Changelog

• Bering-uClibc-next - Changelog

Known Issues

• Bering-uClibc-next - Known Issues

Further Documentation

For further information see:

• Bering-uClibc-next - Developer Guide for Developers of new features or new application Packages.