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This is a great resource for those building embedded systems and want to understand how everything is really put together. Did this years ago and learned a ton

This is a great resource for those building embedded systems and want to understand how everything is really put together. Did this years ago and learned a ton, that said I'd probably never do it again. Once you know, you know. And sometimes you wish you knew less.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>And sometimes you wish you knew less This is how I felt when learning Go, coming from a background of OOP languages. But it was worth it.
- reticentraccoon 6y ago
  Interesting, what about Go made you feel that you wished you knew less and why was it worth it? (I am mostly familiar with OOP languages and not so much with Go)
  - cultofmetatron 6y ago
    probably because Go lacks a lot of features for abstraction that more powerful languages have. Once you've worked with generics for instance, its hard to go back to copy-pasting entire code snippets for data structures only to change a few lines here and there.
    - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      @reticentraccoon Parent has answered the first part of your question. As for why Go was worth the trouble, is because of its Utility nature, it has been the perfect replacement for Python as it doesn't have performance limitations(no need to find C extensions) and I'm rolling out production applications faster than ever before with Go.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Better not learn Lisp then (do, it's worth it).
roguesherlock 6y ago
lmao totally agree. I once took a operating system course on a whim. Built primitives for an mips system. Absolutely loved it but wouldn't do it again :)
kwanbix 6y ago
I did it about 20 years ago. It was basically copy and paste. Very little explanation of why are we doing this and what are the options. That is my memory of it.
- gcmrtc 6y ago
  Same experience with Gentoo and Arch.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  It's not an in-depth theoretical guide, true, but it is still an awesome introduction and source of muscle-memory.
- barrkel 6y ago
  I also did it 20 years ago, but I got a lot more out of it. As each piece went in, I looked at it and what it did, and understood it as part of the whole that was built at the end. If you don't do it reflectively, and simply copy and paste command lines, then I agree, you're not going to get anything out of it. As it was, I had to debug a few build issues here and there, with version drift; that too was educational. The biggest thing to come out of it for me, apart from understanding the Linux boot process better and a greater appreciation for chroot, was getting comfortable with ./configure [options] && make && make install for installing software from source.
  - mcdevilkiller 6y ago
    Exactly my experience, around 4 years ago
drran 6y ago
Why you need to build OS for a new device from scratch? To quadruple efforts needed?
stingraycharles 6y ago
How would you compare the experience of Gentoo / Arch vs LFS? I used to do a lot of Gentoo back in the day, and nowadays occasionally Arch, and while I believe it lead me to have a very solid foundation of a lot the system, especially the kernel bootstrapping process is a bit of a gray area to me (how do initial ramdisks fit in the picture for example). Is my understanding correct that these are the things that you definitely have to work through with LFS?
- cogman10 6y ago
  It's lower level than either gentoo or arch. You are literally going through and running the build process for each installed package. As for bootstrapping, it's been a while since I did it, but that was mostly just setting up grub and pointing it at your newly minted kernel. Grub handles all the "where is this on the disk" issues for you.
- mcdevilkiller 6y ago
  Gentoo/Arch build a LFS for you.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

>And sometimes you wish you knew less This is how I felt when learning Go, coming from a background of OOP languages. But it was worth it.

reticentraccoon 6y ago
Interesting, what about Go made you feel that you wished you knew less and why was it worth it? (I am mostly familiar with OOP languages and not so much with Go)
- cultofmetatron 6y ago
  probably because Go lacks a lot of features for abstraction that more powerful languages have. Once you've worked with generics for instance, its hard to go back to copy-pasting entire code snippets for data structures only to change a few lines here and there.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    @reticentraccoon Parent has answered the first part of your question. As for why Go was worth the trouble, is because of its Utility nature, it has been the perfect replacement for Python as it doesn't have performance limitations(no need to find C extensions) and I'm rolling out production applications faster than ever before with Go.
globular-toast 6y ago
Better not learn Lisp then (do, it's worth it).

roguesherlock 6y ago

lmao totally agree. I once took a operating system course on a whim. Built primitives for an mips system. Absolutely loved it but wouldn't do it again :)

kwanbix 6y ago

I did it about 20 years ago. It was basically copy and paste. Very little explanation of why are we doing this and what are the options. That is my memory of it.

gcmrtc 6y ago
Same experience with Gentoo and Arch.
smitty1e 6y ago
It's not an in-depth theoretical guide, true, but it is still an awesome introduction and source of muscle-memory.
barrkel 6y ago
I also did it 20 years ago, but I got a lot more out of it. As each piece went in, I looked at it and what it did, and understood it as part of the whole that was built at the end. If you don't do it reflectively, and simply copy and paste command lines, then I agree, you're not going to get anything out of it. As it was, I had to debug a few build issues here and there, with version drift; that too was educational. The biggest thing to come out of it for me, apart from understanding the Linux boot process better and a greater appreciation for chroot, was getting comfortable with ./configure [options] && make && make install for installing software from source.
- mcdevilkiller 6y ago
  Exactly my experience, around 4 years ago

drran 6y ago

Why you need to build OS for a new device from scratch? To quadruple efforts needed?

stingraycharles 6y ago

How would you compare the experience of Gentoo / Arch vs LFS? I used to do a lot of Gentoo back in the day, and nowadays occasionally Arch, and while I believe it lead me to have a very solid foundation of a lot the system, especially the kernel bootstrapping process is a bit of a gray area to me (how do initial ramdisks fit in the picture for example). Is my understanding correct that these are the things that you definitely have to work through with LFS?

cogman10 6y ago
It's lower level than either gentoo or arch. You are literally going through and running the build process for each installed package. As for bootstrapping, it's been a while since I did it, but that was mostly just setting up grub and pointing it at your newly minted kernel. Grub handles all the "where is this on the disk" issues for you.
mcdevilkiller 6y ago
Gentoo/Arch build a LFS for you.