FreeBSD's embedded agenda

[Chad R. Larson]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 06:30:45AM +0100, James Mansion wrote:
> The scenario would seem to be:
>  - very small form factor and cost per unit
>  - so no physical spinning disk
>  - *and* you need a lot of updates
> 
> Its the last of these that bears scrutiny.

I've been using m0n0BSD on Soekris hardware.  The "disk" is a CF
card, and booting consists of creating a RAM drive and then
populating it from the CF.  The CF stays mounted R/O unless some
persistant information (like, configuration) needs to be saved, at
which time it is remounted R/W until the update is completed and
then put back to R/O.

This satisfies the "no moving parts" and small form factor issues.

It seems to me that if the VM could/would be willing to do its
demand paging off the CF, so RAM would only have to hold dirty pages
that we'd hit the sweet spot for embedded systems of small to medium
production runs.  Especially since CF is now available in gigabyte
sizes.

	-crl
--
Chad R. Larson (CRL15)       602-264-5009       chad at DCFinc.com
Else:   chad at larsons.org   http://public.xdi.org/=Chad.R.Larson
DCF, Inc., 1701 East Colter Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85016-3381