Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 23:51:15 +1030 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: teima@kk.etx.ericsson.se (Valter Mazzaro) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Embedded FreeBSD Message-ID: <199801311321.XAA04162@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 30 Jan 1998 10:01:42 BST." <199801300901.KAA09509@kk661.kk.etx.ericsson.se>
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> At the moment we are investigating the possibility of implementing a > router card, i.e. a board substituting each Pentium PC. > We are trying to understand if we need to have a complete and commercial > RTOS or we can live with a BSD-like product. > As we are not so experienced in the embedded products field, I'm wondering > if some of you guys can give us an hint about it. You can do this reasonably easily; it depends on your cost target and desired form factors, and whether you want to design inhouse or use off-the-shelf parts. > 1) Is it possible to embed FreeBSD or whichever BSD on a single board > system? Yes. For small systems, it's positively trivial. > 2) Do you have any pointer to www sites, specific mailing lists, > articles, books, etc. that can help us? Not really. The "small systems" case above basically refers to the floppy-sized case; you build a floppy-disk-sized image containing a kernel and a compiled-in MFS image with your desired binaries, then blow it into a flash disk/EPROM disk, whatever. The BIOS on your SBC then loads the image, and FreeBSD thinks its come off a floppy. This lets you use real floppies for development, which is cheap and speedy (and for that matter you can keep using floppies in your final product if you want). In many ways, that's not a bad idea; floppy drives are cheap, reasonably robust, and your customers can make backups/upgrade/whatever very easily. > As you understand, we don't need just a yes/no answer, even because > running through the mailing lists archive it seems that is an old > question, and the answer it should be yes. What we need is to have > any indication about HOW to do it (stripped down systems, prom as > virtual disks, embedded SW structure, SW loading on the on-board > processor, an so on) See the PicoBSD stuff (on ftp.cdrom.com) for sample scripts for generating really stripped-down systems. These are ideally suited to the floppy-disk approach. > We don't like so much the idea of leaving FreeBSD, all of us are very > astonished how well it works, but the problem is that we lack information > for this further step. If you want to discuss this in detail, feel free to ask more questions, or mail me directly if you think it's inappropriate for general discussion. I've done much of this in various places already, so I know it's achievable. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\
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