Available LINUX features ?

[augustus_meyer]

Coming from Ubuntu and openwrt, for a special industrial project I am evaluating the possibility to port running openwrt stuff (mqtt, wireguard, lua, modbus/rtu ...) AND actual code (digital I/O, modbus/rtu ...), running on some small STM32, all together on ONE other platform. Your A64 board seems to have sufficient hardware resources, BUT the question is for me, which LINUX based software packages can I use ?
Being very familar with openwrt, there are many many packages available, which I also know from ubuntu. Is there a list of available packages, or how about cross compiling the sources, like I can do on openwrt, when building my own firmware image.

[LubOlimex]

The A64 board runs our Olimage Linux image you can find more info about it here:

https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/blob/master/DOCUMENTS/OLIMAGE/Olimage-guide.pdf

There is good chance our A64 board will work with OpenWRT. But we don't officially support it, anything different from Olimage is community and customer effort. Make sure to first search for "Olimex A64 OpenWRT" to see the state of support.


We have one OpenWRT board - RT5350F-OLinuXino-EVB. You can find it here:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/RT5350F/RT5350F-OLinuXino-EVB/open-source-hardware

[augustus_meyer]

Thank you for the info. Unfortunately, the RT5350F-OLinuXino-EVB does not look powerful enough; and the openwrt-support for the A64-OLinuXino family seems to be rudimentary, not good enough for an industrial, commercial control system.
I am not bound to openwrt, still open for something new. But incorporation of a lot of additional software packages into your image myself will be too much work, and to risky.
I hoped for some mechanism, like the"feeds"on openwrt, to include additional packages like "wireguard", "openvpn", "mosquitto" etc. into your image.
Anyway, thank you for your responsivenes.

[jch]

The A64 runs a fairly standard Debian image, with just some minor Olimex additions and a slightly patched kernel.  Thus, it is possible to install extra packages using the standard Debian tools (apt and friend).

An interesting feature is that installing an image from SD card copies the contents of the SD card.  Thus, it is possible to configure the right set of packages during a boot from SD, and then install the same image on multiple boards.

Generating a complete image programatically, as you do with embedded systems such as OpenWRT and Yocto Linux, is not part of the mainstream Debian culture.  Debootstrap is a tool to do that, and I've successfully used it in the past to generate a Debian root filesystem for an (non-Olimex) ARM board; however, you're not going to find anything as streamlined as the OpenWRT build system.

If OpenWRT is what you want, then it should not be too difficult to port it to the A64.  If you've got a budget, you should ask on the OpenWRT developers' mailing list whether anyone would be willing to do it for you.