This highly detailed 101-page how-to article provides the necessary background and procedures to turn a SEGA Dreamcast gaming console into a Linux-based software router with firewalling and virtual private networking capabilities. The article explains how to create the necessary toolchain for compiling both programs and the Linux kernel, and shows how, starting from scratch, you can build a Linux operating system that runs entirely in memory.. . .
This highly detailed 101-page how-to article provides the necessary background and procedures to turn a SEGA Dreamcast gaming console into a Linux-based software router with firewalling and virtual private networking capabilities. The article explains how to create the necessary toolchain for compiling both programs and the Linux kernel, and shows how, starting from scratch, you can build a Linux operating system that runs entirely in memory.

Why bother?

Today, the total costs of ownership (TCO) of a personal computer are so low, that you might wonder: "Why bother to build a software router based on a gaming console?"

Actually, a number of technical challenges made the project particularly interesting, including . . .

  • First, the hardware architecture is a non-x86 computer system, so there is the challenge of learning to work with a "foreign" platform.

  • Next, there is the challenge of learning to setup and use cross compilers. Cross compiling raises a number of issues you don't run into when you are simply recompiling your favorite program to run on your (x86) PC, assuming the program was already designed to run on an x86 platform.

  • Last but not least, I haven't found any articles describing the set of steps I summarized above -- so, I wanted to be the first! :-)

The link for this article located at LinuxDevices is no longer available.