Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 02:06:31 -0500 (EST) From: Jay Kuri <jay@oneway.com> To: Jonathon Tidswell <jont@cse.unsw.edu.au> Cc: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: status / appropriateness query Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0012080143570.69292-100000@daedal.oneway.com> In-Reply-To: <20001208131517.A29977@cse.unsw.edu.au>
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Hello, I've been down this road as well. About a year ago now, I developed an embedded PicoBSD network gateway device. I was using customized hardware but the overall picture was similar. Pentium processor, 8M onboard flash, 2 serial and 3 ethernet ports + PCI expansion (which was unused). It seems as though PicoBSD has come quite a ways since I was looking at it, but even then it was relatively easy to understand by reading the build scripts. Back then I posted instructions on how to build a bootable Flash PicoBSD installation... which is in the archives at: http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=19197+25615+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-small/19990801.freebsd-small But that is for PicoBSD 0.44. (FreeBSD 3.2) Shouldn't be too different. Forgive me if I'm wrong, I haven't played with picobsd in a while. What I can tell you from experience is that PicoBSD worked great for me. I built some really nice powerful network devices on it. We had a little more in the way of memory (128M actually) but way way back in the day, I ran 'standard' FreeBSD (with X) in 8M on a 486... so I think it's probably just a matter of tweaking your config. The nice thing about a large-ish (8M in my case) flash is that you can keep your binaries there, instead of in MFS which reduces your memory requirement for picobsd to the 'standard' for FreeBSD (which according to the handbook is 8M 'recommended'... implying you could go lower, right?) I think we even had a 'standard' freebsd install (super-trimmed down) on 8M at one point. I could be lying about that though... I know we wound up using PicoBSD on our 8M flash machines and 'standard' FreeBSD on our 200M flash machines. As an aside, we had about 5M left over on our 8M flash machines after the picobsd install. =) I think you'll just have to try it to be sure. The only potential problem I really see is the 4M memory. Hope this helps, Jay > Im involved with a project that is currently being pushed into Linux in > an embedded space. > > I think Pico/Tiny BSD may be a reasonable alternative. > But the PicoBSD web pages are getting old and getting a coherent picture > from the freebsd-small list archive is hard. > > I suppose my major question is to what extend does Pico/Tiny BSD give > me additional kernel tuning options over standard FreeBSD ? > > TIA > - JonT > > PS Here are some basic details in case it helps. > > The project is basically an embedded computer on a PCI board with some > custom hardware and some assurance requirements. Its not hard real time. > > The board has basically > 486sx > some flash memory (holds bootloader and some config info) > a serial port > a PCI interface > 4MB ram > some custom hardware (does specialised data processing) > > I dont think I need paging, there will probably always be less than > twenty processes running on the system, I may need a socket interface, > but only a little of networking, probably no buffer cache, > maybe even no pseudo ttys, ... > > The currently proposed solution is linux paging back over the host > interface. I'd rather no GPL, more RAM for caching and reduced host interface > load. Of course I could be being greedy, since I really don't have time to > fork a kernel project, and probably not the patience to debug it :-) > [ Fortunately there is bootloader written & tested that loads the OS over > the host interface so lots of testing/debugging is simplified already. ] > > -- > Jon Tidswell <jont@cse.unsw.edu.au> > School of Computer Science & Engineering > University of NSW, 2052, Australia > Disclaimer: I think my thoughts are my own, and I believe my writings are too. > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - UNIX: because reboots are for hardware upgrades Jay Kuri jay@oneway.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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