FreeBSD's embedded agenda

[Michael A. Williams]

Hi There,

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
...
> What can you do ?
> 
> If you work with embedded FreeBSD, I think the best you can do is to
> chime in to small at freebsd.org, tell us what you are doing (as far as
> company policy will allow you), and if you have any ideas, wishes,
> problems, let us hear about them.

We use NanoBSD on Soekris with CF media and find the 'subtractive'
aproach followed by customise scripts does a lot of the work for us, we
then add from port built packages along with our own stuff on top.

Doing this before Nano was a lot of work each time we wanted to move OS
revision's.

First we only used the single Nano image along with other partitions of
our own choosing with updates applied through the file system which has
worked well but is not as good as using the dual Nano image which we are
now moving to, giving two update levels, either of the two Nano images
and per file.

Having no moving parts is so useful in the harsher environments where
our systems end up and we are pretty happy with Nano+Soekris. 

A smaller footprint Arm system is likely to be an area we would be
interested in now to give us a lower end product, for scaling up the
other way we still use an altered Nano on a CF card adpater in a PC
chassis base unit to get the extra clock cycles and memory required.

To get our packages on we run the Nano built image up on an hdd, install
the packages along with our custom configs and our own stuff and then dd
that back to an image server with the result's dd out to CF, I sure
there may be an easier way but this works for us.

> It would be great if we could park a couple of developers full time
> on embedded FreeBSD in the future, but that would take some serious
> financial support from the user community, if you think your company
> could be persuaded to help with this, get in touch with the FreeBSD
> foundation.

As soon as we get into profit on our project :) we would like to help in
some way and are very thankful for such a high quality FreeBSD.

Mike.

-- 
Michael A. Williams
Director NetXsecure NZ Ltd & Billing Solutions Ltd
Ph: +64.3.317.9425 Fax: +64.3.317.9426 Mob: +64.21.995.914 
www.nxs.co.nz  www.billingsolutionsltd.co.nz skype: mike_netxsecure