From owner-freebsd-small Wed Jan 26 13: 7:10 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Received: from rover.village.org (rover.village.org [204.144.255.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2628F152CE for ; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 13:07:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (harmony.village.org [10.0.0.6]) by rover.village.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA01058; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 14:06:59 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (localhost.village.org [127.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.9.3/8.8.3) with ESMTP id OAA02060; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 14:06:35 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200001262106.OAA02060@harmony.village.org> To: "Jeffrey S. Sharp" Cc: "Greg Lehey" , "freebsd-small" In-reply-to: Your message of "26 Jan 2000 00:38:35 CST." <002201bf67c6$f76b4090$0dea5e18@mmcable.com> References: <002201bf67c6$f76b4090$0dea5e18@mmcable.com> <3888D5CF.329989@achtung.com> <20000122145538.A390@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> <20000124122024.A4574@horus.co.jyu.fi> <20000125103358.U2643@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> <005f01bf66f4$05a499f0$0dea5e18@mmcable.com> <20000126075825.C42227@freebi Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 14:06:35 -0700 From: Warner Losh Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <002201bf67c6$f76b4090$0dea5e18@mmcable.com> "Jeffrey S. Sharp" writes: : Therefore, I suggest something like what Warner has done (and that I am : working on as time permits), where the flash is the root fs and /tmp, : /var, and so on are mounted as small MFS filesystems. The flash is : normally kept mounted read-only. Yes. That's right. I have permisson to make the mkflash stuff available. I'd like to mak eit into a port or something. : Then, instead of running an update : script, one simply remounts the flash read-write, makes changes, and : remounts read-only. This gets hard to manage in a hurry, but is effective. We actually have two R/W partitions in our system. One we leave r/w all the time, the other we leave unmounted. From time to time we dump everything from the first to the second. That way if the first one develops a readonly spot, we can switch to the other. Our projections are that we'll have to do this after about 5 years of use (our devices are intended to have a 10 year life). This makes flash 3x better than IDE drives that have a very very high failure rate (like 1 per 50 systems installed per month). This is why we're moving to flash... Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message