Bering-uClibc 6.x

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Revision as of 15:36, 1 May 2016 by Kapeka (Talk | contribs) (Development History)

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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.

Main Features

The key characteristics of Bering-uClibc 6.x are:

  • Based on a recent long-term release of the Linux Kernel.
  • Targeted to run on industry standard devices even with non-x86 processors.
    QEMU ARM Screenshot
    Bering-uClibc 5.0-prealpha running on an emulated ARM processor
  • 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 storing configuration settings.
    • The uClibc-ng C library is used in place of the GNU C Library since uClibc-ng 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 are no writes on HDD/flash during work (except saving configurations during maintenance) - so a 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

Bering-uClibc 6.x is basically Bering-uClibc 5.x brought up to date with the latest versions of the main software components and with reworked toolchain. Bering-uClibc 6.0 provides in particular:

  • gcc update to 5.3.0.
  • The Linux kernel has been upgraded to 4.4.x.
  • The uClibc library is upgraded from uClibc 0.9.32 to uClibc-ng 1.0.x.

Version Changelog

Known Issues

Further Documentation

For further information see: