Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 07:49:06 +0200 From: Erik Cederstrand <erik@cederstrand.dk> To: Tim Judd <tjudd2k@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: minimal install is too big Message-ID: <4705D052.50302@cederstrand.dk> In-Reply-To: <173981.50407.qm@web62415.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: <173981.50407.qm@web62415.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
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Tim Judd wrote: > Hi all, > > Recently, for pure entertainment and a little bit of a experience > thing, I have been looking and/or finding many devices that have linux > embedded. While in of itself the fact that it works, I'm not > discounting. But I'd like to expand it or get it running on a system > that I am familiar with. So I was playing with the idea of using > FreeBSD on such devices, and I would deal with the individual hardware > specs if I could get the general system small enough. > > The minimal install of FreeBSD as from the developers is about 130MB. > I want to get something working on a 8MB flash. (For those curious, > it's a ethernet NAS device) > > picobsd is discontinued, nanobsd claims it can fit in 64MB. I'd even > go with some NetBSD flavor, as long as it's not "linux." I've done > some research and would like to see this happen, but may just end up > using the GPL code from Linksys to get it working as I need it to. > > Thanks for any update/idea/clue. I guess the answer is "depends on what you need". The most minimal system (just a prompt and a few utilities in from /rescue) would probably be mfsroot.gz from the installation media. It's around 4MB - you can add your own utilities from there, but it's a bit tedious to find out exactly which files, utilities and libraries you need. An alternative would be to have your root filesystem NFS-mounted. That way, you only need a kernel and a few boot files on the flash to boot, if your device doesn't support PXE. There are a lot of tips in the "FreeBSD from Scratch" article [1]. Also, Erik Nørgaard's "PXEBoot Guide"[2] has lots of good info on net-booting. And then there's of course FreeNAS[3] if you can get it running on your device. Erik [1] http://freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/fbsd-from-scratch/ [2] http://www.locolomo.org/pub/pxeboot/article.html [3] http://www.freenas.org/
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