Making Armbian more embedded

[Peter Allen]

I've been using Armbian for developing an image for running on some custom hardware based on an Allwinner S3 (SoC with a single arm v7 core and 128mb ram) and it has been really helpful.

My system now runs the software it was built for, and i love having complete Debian for development, maintenance and debugging.

 

However I would like to have the option of making the system more like an embedded system most of the time : for most of its life it's running a custom application that gets video from a camera, h264 encodes it and sends it and some other data out over a data link. When it's in this mode it would be great if it was more like a buildroot type system, ideally with a nice short boot time.

However some of the time i want to keep the possibility of a user booting into full Linux as I'm running now.

 

How would you go about this?

at the moment I'm looking at creating a custom systemd target with as little as possible for embedded. Does that make sense?

[Hqnicolas]

Kernel 6.12+ 
RT patch
Usage

 

make your own kernel config with armbian build

[robertoj]

Start with a minimal image: no X11, no desktop

 

sudo systemctl list-units --type=service --all

 

Find those services you don't need, and "sudo systemctl disable <service>"

 

Is buildroot a nice experience like armbian?