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Date:      Wed, 26 Jan 2000 07:58:25 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        "Jeffrey S. Sharp" <jss@subatomix.com>
Cc:        freebsd-small <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: New approach to picobsd
Message-ID:  <20000126075825.C42227@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <005f01bf66f4$05a499f0$0dea5e18@mmcable.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>

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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
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