RFC: enhancing the root mount logic

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Aug 24, 2010, at 8:52 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> 
>> I see your point and buy into the argument, but not
>> entirely. I explicitly mentioned "embedding" and so
>> far your arguments include things like GENERIC being
>> 10MB or Linux server startup.
>> 
>> We're not exactly discussing the same thing are we?
> 
> This friend's company used linux in an embedded system [it
> was a fileserver product.  Presumably the OS had to run in a
> restricted environment since the FS space would be for their
> customers' use + you don't want to have to reload the OS when
> a disk dies! And yet you want the ability to upgrade your OS
> s/w etc.]
> 
> In my job[-2] we used FreeBSD as an embedded OS. IIRC we just
> ran from a readonly flash FS as root.  An upgrade was just a
> new FS image, including kernel + utilities.  Didn't Juniper
> do something similar?

Juniper's approach is still heavily rooted in PC-class H/W.
With Book-E, ARM and MIPS products for the low(er)-end and
in particular without these products having a real harddisk,
the existing way has shown it's problems and limitations.

Also: Juniper has hacked a few tools, including the kernel
at large and md(4) in particular to implement features they
needed/wanted, which I'd like to get away from.

FYI,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com