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Date:      Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:36:30 +0100 (CET)
From:      Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>
To:        Cristian Angelini <chr.ang@biella.alpcom.it>
Cc:        small@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: PC/104 and picobsd
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9811091320230.12865-100000@korin.warman.org.pl>
In-Reply-To: <3646D0B0.55D997F5@biella.alpcom.it>

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On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Cristian Angelini wrote:

> Hi everybody !

Hi,

> What I need now it's some more information about the use of picobsd in a
> pc/104 environment. I read the info on the Mesa site, but I still lack
> some basic startup hints: what items should I buy to completely develop
> a prototype and so on. Are all the devices implemented on that cards
> (Flash IDE, ethernet,..) completely supported by picobsd ? May I install
> something like PPP on that cards ?

> Some hints would be a great help :)

Well, I don't have a first-hand experience with PC/104 (yet :-), but as
far as I understand it picobsd will run on such boards without any
problems. PC/104 bus looks like any other ISA bus to the system. The only
caveats which come to my mind are:

* the startup media: if it's going to be a flash disk, make sure it's
either IDE flash disk, or DiskOnChip (M-Systems) - otherwise you won't be
able to mount/write/read it,

* Ethernet controller: FreeBSD 3.0 contains driver for CSxxxx based
ethernet cards, which are commonly used in embedded designs. For other
chips you must consult LINT very carefully.

* you can use PPP, of course, if you have something which looks like a
serial port - be it a modem, or a null-modem cable...

* my experiments have shown that it's possible to run quite a number of
relatively big processes (such as /bin/sh, a number of getty's, SNMP
daemon, PPP) on a 386SX with 4MB RAM. YMMV, of course, but the amount of
RAM is the critical issue, not the CPU power. One comment here, though: if
you _really_ want to use 386 _SX_, you should assume that the kernel is
stored uncompressed - decompression takes ca. 90 secs, and it gets
boring...

Andrzej Bialecki

--------------------   ++-------++  -------------------------------------
 <abial@nask.pl>       ||PicoBSD||   FreeBSD in your pocket? Go and see:
 Research & Academic   |+-------+|       "Small & Embedded FreeBSD"
 Network in Poland     | |TT~~~| |    http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/
--------------------   ~-+==---+-+  -------------------------------------


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