General Goals

These are the general goals of the Embedded Linux Workshop:

• It must be easy to learn.

• It must be useful in real-world situations.

These are the goals of the embedded Linux applications you can build with ELW:

• Minimal code size. The top priority of any embedded Linux toolkit should really be building an embedded Linux application that minimizes code size. The smaller the code, the less memory and flash required to run the application; this reduces the final assembly cost.

• Extensibility. The Embedded Linux Workshop strives to be as extensible as possible. Adding support for various application packages, library technologies, and processors should be conceptually easy. This is especially important in the Open Source world, where a project can take on a life of its own—if it’s difficult to manage the software, that project’s growth can be quite limited.

• Upgradeability. New versions of Open Source products can come fast and furious. If project developers want users to accept and test upgrades, they must make upgrading—and sometimes downgrading—easy. Therefore, the Embedded Linux Workshop is put together so that the embedded project you’re working on doesn’t live in or have much to do with a specific version of the workshop itself. You could have several versions of the workshop running on your machine at any given time, and build your project with any one of them.

I’ll talk more about the goals of ELW later on in this chapter.

Of course, you may decide to use a different toolkit to build your embedded Linux product, but I hope that the concepts you learn with the Embedded Linux Workshop will be helpful in evaluating and using any other toolkit you encounter.