From owner-freebsd-small Tue Jan 25 13:29: 2 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 59842150A8 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2000 13:28:38 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id HAA42351; Wed, 26 Jan 2000 07:58:25 +1030 (CST) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 07:58:25 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: "Jeffrey S. Sharp" Cc: freebsd-small Subject: Re: New approach to picobsd Message-ID: <20000126075825.C42227@freebie.lemis.com> References: <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> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <005f01bf66f4$05a499f0$0dea5e18@mmcable.com> WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday, 24 January 2000 at 23:21:24 -0600, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: >> Unfortunately, the current PicoBSD system is oriented towards >> floppies. This has the great disadvantage, at least in the current >> implementation, that each crunched executable repeats the library >> contents. For a flash memory system it would make more sense to have >> a single executable, which might be larger than a single floppy. > > Another thing: using MFS for the root filesystem is bad for flash. (A) > Big MFS sizes on big flash disks make memory requirements too high; (B) > There is no need to make it possible for one to remove the flash disk > after booting. The way I see it, big MFSs are incidental to the use of flash; they expect a certain amount of memory. But yes, we could execute the programs directly from flash, we wouldn't need them in the mfs. It should be relatively straightforward to do that in the current build process: it builds a floppy image and an mfs. The mfs contains the crunched executable. It then writes the mfs to the floppy image, then copies the floppy image to a floppy. In the flash case, we would write the floppy image to flash. There's no reason why we shouldn't put a crunched executable on the flash image. > But then there's the problem of /var and /tmp.... They would need to be in mfs. You can't get away without any writable file space, and you don't want to be writing to your flash all the time. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message