Work on my Research Project: Buildroot Linux

Orange Pi Mini 2

Today I decided that I was going to work on something for my sophomore research project. For those who do not know, my research project is utilizing a large but inexpensive cluster of Orange Pi PC Single-Board-Computers (SBC) to perform tasks typically performed by $5,000+ high-performance servers. One of the tasks I need to accomplish is creating a lightweight operating system (OS) to run my tests on. Also, I would prefer not to use the OS images provided for Orange Pi, since they contain a major bug which needs to be corrected/edited to get them to function properly. I have some constraints for my selection of a platform - it must be minimal, lightweight, fast, customizable, and easily deployable.

On v86 I tried a system called Buildroot, and found it to run efficiently there. I thought that if Buildroot could run fast on v86, it should be able to run even faster on a real system. So, I pulled up the website and read about it. Buildroot is a relatively simple and straightforward tool for creating specific-purpose Linux systems. It allows the user to select the software to download, as well as the compiling configurations, so that s/he can get exactly what s/he wants with no extra packages wasting valuable CPU and memory. The user can specify the proper drivers for the particular compilation which will work perfectly with the hardware. Buildroot can output the completed system into an image file which can be dumped directly onto the target device. This seemed promising, so I cloned the git repository and began to experiment with it.

As I began to work with it, I noticed a few unusual aspects of the system. During configuration, it will display the root password in visible plain-text, thereby potentially compromising the security of the system. In addition, the default password encryption scheme is md5, which is not the best choice for an embedded system (or any other system for that matter). Luckily, the user can select stronger password encryption schemes, such as SHA-256 and SHA-512, as alternative options. Also, it does not have nearly as many available software options to use with it as other systems. Despite these quirks, Buildroot looks as if it may be a good fit for my project. For now, I need to get back to my homework and continue exploring later.

#slice2016