[CUWiN-Dev] Re: CUWIN on Meraki Mini

[Matthew Isaacs]

On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 15:31 -0500, Bob Keyes wrote:
> Hi,
> I am interested in porting CuWIN to the Netgear WGT634U, which I have
> about 30 of, and my friend has about 50 of. They are very similar to the
> Meraki Mini and the FON, but better, because they have mini-PCI socketed
> Atheros cards and a USB 2.0 controller. Considering the low price of USB
> flash these days, I plan on taking advantage of this (I only wish there
> were right-angle or short USB extender cables that were cheap - having the
> USB flash stick out of the unit like that makes it physically vulnerable
> to being bumped).
> 
> What I'd like to know, is how to go from NetBSD source to CuWIN - i.e. how
> to do the vast amount of binary shrinkage needed to fit on small flash
> devices. I know there's a tool, I can't remember the name of it now, that
> combines a bunch of BSD binaries into one executable, making it smaller.
> But this didn't seem to save much, because of the large size of libraries
> needed (Maybe I should have built everything static?).
> 

Crunchgen is the name of the tool.  There has been some work on using it
to reduce the size of the image, however I am unsure of the status of
the project.  I believe it was discovered that even crunched the image
comes up a bit large.  There are other projects under way and proposed
to reduce the size of some components.  The big 2 here is DHCP and DNS.
ISC-DHCP and BIND (client resolver) consume a lot of flash real estate.
Several months ago I started porting udhcp to NetBSD as a possible
replacement for ISC-DHCP.  WIDE is another alternative that is under
consideration.Unfortunately, I haven't had time lately to work on the
port.


> I am a Linux guy, and know some BSD, but the current broken-ness of
> madwifi-ng is making me want to move to the BSD camp, and that means
> CuWIN.
> 
> There's also a new Atheros based board coming out from linkgear.jjplus.com
> which is really nice. The main developer is a friend of mine. I'd like to
> be able to get CuWIN and BSD onto that box. He's very much a Linux guy,
> I'd like to introduce him to the possibilities of the BSD world (Net,
> Open, Free).
> 
> -Bob
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