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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!dciteleport.com!worldnet.att.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.uoregon.edu!la-news1.digilink.net!news.wdc.net!usenet From: Darren Bordelon <darren@wdc.net> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Embedded FreeBSD Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 17:11:28 -0800 Organization: WDC Lines: 41 Message-ID: <32B744C0.2DA9@wdc.net> Reply-To: darren@wdc.net NNTP-Posting-Host: darren.wdc.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win95; I) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:32731 Hi, We would like to try and use FreeBSD in an embedded system, but we are not sure about the feasibility of certain methods one might use to achieve this. After we get some ideas, and get a working system, we will post our experiences. First, we would like to have about 4megs of ram. What are the best methods of minimizing kernel usage? Of course, we will not be using most of the normal daemons. Also, we would be removing all of the device drivers that we don't need. Are there other ways to further decrease system usage? On the booting issue, can Freebsd be made into some sort of a system image, whereby a small boot loader program could put it from rom into ram, and then jump to the right instruction in the kernel? If so, what are the initialization concerns? There would be 0 swap. Is this going to be a problem? We would like to have the the file system in flash ram at some address beyond the normal ram memory. Can the kernel be configured, perhaps with the ram disk driver, to use such a memory space for a ram disk, or would a completely new device driver be needed in this situation? We would not need most of the stuff under /etc. What is required, if anything, by the kernel in this dir? We could also use a rom floppy to boot, would this make things much easier? Are there other ways that we might used to "boot" the system? What other issues might we need to consider, and what other methods might be useful in embedding FreeBSD? Any pointers, thoughts, musings, etc. on this subject will be greatly appreciated. Again, we will post a compilation of suggestions, techniques, and our own successes once we have gotten an embedded FreeBSD working. Darren darren@wdc.net