DPF - my side project using OE

I have been looking into ways to utilize an old laptop, which been sitting on a shelf collecting dust for quite some time. One of the ideas was to convert it into a digital picture frame. There are many such projects explained on the Internet and specifically at Instructables. First, since the laptop had no hard drive in it, I needed a Compact Flash card with a CF-to-IDE converter. Luckily I had both and the next step was to think about the software.

The obvious choice was to use OpenEmbedded to build a small filesystem with necessary components to access my pictures from the fileserver (hopefully wirelessly...). That's one of the things I don't like about most of the DPF products available on the market - they can only load images from local storage or from flash cards. There are few WiFi-enabled picture frames, but they are limited and expensive. Since I have all of the required hardware components and necessary knowledge (I hope) to build a nice WiFi-enabled digital picture frame myself, I jumped right into this DIY project.

Since the laptop I was going to use is a PentiumIII based, I tried to build a minimal image for an i686 architecure. That's where I hit a snag - apparently, glibc refuses to build for any of the i686, pentiumpro or pentium3 architectures and it's been discussed a lot. Not sure about the actual reason it was never fixed in glibc, I was able to find a patch for eglibc from Khem Raj, which happened to apply to glibc as well. I have opened a bug ticket and emailed to the list (see below).

Now I'm able to build stuff for my future digital picture frame...

diff --git a/packages/glibc/files/march-i686.patch b/packages/glibc/files/march-i686.patch
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0461603
--- /dev/null
+++ b/packages/glibc/files/march-i686.patch
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+2007-02-15  Khem Raj  
+
+       * sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/sysdep.h: Re-define __i686.
+       * nptl/sysdeps/pthread/pt-initfini.c: Ditto.
+
+
+
+Index: sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/sysdep.h
+===================================================================
+--- sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/sysdep.h (revision 1469)
++++ sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/sysdep.h (working copy)
+@@ -29,6 +29,10 @@
+ #include 
+ #include 
+ 
++#if defined __i686 && defined __ASSEMBLER__
++#undef __i686
++#define __i686 __i686
++#endif
+ 
+ /* For Linux we can use the system call table in the header file
+  /usr/include/asm/unistd.h
+Index: nptl/sysdeps/pthread/pt-initfini.c
+===================================================================
+--- nptl/sysdeps/pthread/pt-initfini.c (revision 1469)
++++ nptl/sysdeps/pthread/pt-initfini.c (working copy)
+@@ -45,6 +45,11 @@
+ /* Embed an #include to pull in the alignment and .end directives. */
+ asm ("\n#include \"defs.h\"");
+ 
++asm ("\n#if defined __i686 && defined __ASSEMBLER__");
++asm ("\n#undef __i686");
++asm ("\n#define __i686 __i686");
++asm ("\n#endif");
++
+ /* The initial common code ends here. */
+ asm ("\n/*@HEADER_ENDS*/");
+ 
diff --git a/packages/glibc/glibc_2.6.1.bb b/packages/glibc/glibc_2.6.1.bb
index 1f72ff0..a6e2dd4 100644
--- a/packages/glibc/glibc_2.6.1.bb
+++ b/packages/glibc/glibc_2.6.1.bb
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@ SRC_URI = "\
   file://glibc-use-isystem-include-fixed.patch;patch=1 \
   file://glibc-arm-no-asm-page.patch;patch=1 \
   file://armv4t-interworking.patch;patch=1 \
+  file://march-i686.patch;patch=1;pnum=0 \
 "
 
 # Build fails on sh3 and sh4 without additional patches