From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Sep 10 23:06:30 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA14583 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Thu, 10 Sep 1998 23:06:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from korin.warman.org.pl (korin.nask.waw.pl [148.81.160.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA14578 for ; Thu, 10 Sep 1998 23:06:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from abial@nask.pl) Received: from localhost (abial@localhost) by korin.warman.org.pl (8.9.1/8.8.5) with SMTP id IAA20824; Fri, 11 Sep 1998 08:10:02 +0200 (CEST) X-Authentication-Warning: korin.warman.org.pl: abial owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 08:10:02 +0200 (CEST) From: Andrzej Bialecki X-Sender: abial@korin.warman.org.pl To: eric cc: Dennis , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Boot from Flash In-Reply-To: <19980910193501.55698@tarsier.domain.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 10 Sep 1998, eric wrote: > On Thu, Sep 10, 1998 at 04:30:36PM -0400, Dennis wrote: > > > > Has anyone used the PC plug-in PCMCIA flash cards successfully with > > FreeBSD? If so can you boot from it without a HD? > I've done some work with this. Yes, you can boot off the flash card just as if > it were a disk. However, there are some problems. Due to the nature of the [...] Excellent explanation, Eric. I came to the same conclusions when doing tests with an IDE flash disk. We may also add here, specifically, that swapping on such device is something which should never be done - so this means you probably have to live without swap, and you have to carefully watch over your memory consumption, otherwise your processes will be killed. Dennis, you may want to subscribe to freebsd-small, which discusses these issues. It's a low volume and (thus far, thank God) strictly technical list... > elsewhere. An ideal solution would be to have a ramdisk union-mounted > on top of the read-only flash, and then as part of the shutdown procedure > write the contents of the ramdisk over the flash once. Unfortunately you > can't do this in freebsd because the union filesystem isn't usable. > (you can mount it, but the kernel panics if you try to access anything in it) Not that I tested it thoroughly... but last time I used mount_union in 3.0-current (a week ago?) it worked ok. YMMV as usual :-) Andrzej Bialecki -------------------- ++-------++ ------------------------------------- ||PicoBSD|| FreeBSD in your pocket? Go and see: Research & Academic |+-------+| "Small & Embedded FreeBSD" Network in Poland | |TT~~~| | http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ -------------------- ~-+==---+-+ ------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message