Going small
John Murphy
jfm at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Apr 20 11:44:18 PDT 2004
The net 4801 arrived well wrapped and boxed but it was soon lidless.
I noticed a 32M flashcard fitted and read about the OpenBSD-3.4
OS installed thereon. A nice touch to have a minimal working
BSD of some kind pre-installed. The card is to be returned to
Wim when finished with.
The first power supply I tried (after checking correct polarity/
voltage etc.) failed because the inner sleeve was too wide for
the pin in the socket.
Made a better null serial lead, connected the soekris to a 4.9
box on the LAN, ran 'cu -l /dev/cuaa0 -s 19200' as root and powered on.
comBIOS ver. 1.24 20040312 Copyright (C) 2000-2004 Soekris Engineering.
net4801
0128 Mbyte Memory CPU Geode 266 Mhz
Pri Mas TOSHIBA THNCF032MBA LBA 496-4-32 31 Mbyte
PXE-M00: BootManage UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
etc.
Pressed ^p within the 5 second countdown for the BIOS prompt and had
a look at some settings. Quickly forgetting where I was, I tried up
arrow for history and lost keyboard input (or echo). "~." or reboot
got it going again. Watched OpenBSD boot on the serial console until
cu disconnected as the OS took over the port. But cu again connected
to a ksh shell in the <32M install.
It's cheating but I took the easier way and put the laptop drive in
the desktop, with one of those handy adaptor leads, for faster kernel
builds. Installed 5.2.1 minimal and sys (kernel sources). After a
few mistakes (one error was 'unknown option "SHED_4BSD"':)) and the
addition of the two options described at:
http://phk.freebsd.dk/soekris/kern48xx.html
the kernel built and installed.
It was odd leaving out vga, fdc and vt devices.
I was surprised to find no sign of the drive when fitted to the soekris.
'set FLASH=Secondary' soon fixed that.
If I'd remembered to change the ifconfig line to sis0 it would have
worked first time. Setting the ttyd0 line in /etc/ttys to 'on' would
have helped too.
The kernel is about 3Mbyte smaller than generic:
chucky# ll /boot/kernel.old/kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5940286 Feb 23 20:45 /boot/kernel.old/kernel
chucky# ll /boot/kernel/kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 2734753 Apr 19 19:42 /boot/kernel/kernel
The HD mounting bracket only leaves room for the lowest profile drives.
Anything fatter than 10mm and the case top cannot be fitted. The board
is < 5.5" wide and a 2.5" HD is < 3" wide. Room for two of each side
by side in a 19" 1U case.
John.
The kernel configuration file is below:
chucky# cat /sys/i386/conf/SOEKRIS
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# FreeBSD 5.2.1 kernel configuration for my Soekris net4801 2004/04/19
#
# adapted from SOEKRIS_NET48xx,v 1.2 2003/09/07 14:07:05 edwin Exp (FBSD 4.8)
#
# additions:
# options CPU_GEODE # Mandatory
# options CPU_SOEKRIS # Recommended (not used yet though)
#
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
machine i386
cpu I586_CPU
ident SOEKRIS
maxusers 0
options SCHED_4BSD #4BSD scheduler
options INET #InterNETworking
#options INET6 #IPv6 communications protocols
options FFS #Berkeley Fast Filesystem
options SOFTUPDATES #Enable FFS soft updates support
options UFS_DIRHASH #Improve performance on big directories
options UFS_ACL #Support for access control lists
options MD_ROOT #MD is a potential root device
options PROCFS #Process filesystem (Requires PSEUDOFS)
options PSEUDOFS #Pseudo filesystem framework
options COMPAT_43 #Compatible with BSD 4.3 [KEEP THIS!]
options COMPAT_FREEBSD4 #Compatible with FreeBSD4
options SYSVSHM #SYSV-style shared memory
options SYSVMSG #SYSV-style message queues
options SYSVSEM #SYSV-style semaphores
options _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING
options CPU_GEODE # Mandatory
options CPU_SOEKRIS # Recommended
device isa
device pci
# Floating point support - do not disable.
device npx
# ATA (IDE) disk - required for CompactFlash too
device ata
device atadisk # ATA disk drives
# Serial (COM) ports
device sio
# MII bus support is required for some PCI 10/100 ethernet NICs
device miibus # MII bus support
device sis # NS DP83815 Fast Ethernet device driver
device wlan # 802.11 support
device wi # WaveLAN/Intersil/Symbol 802.11 wireless NICs.
# Soekris vpn1211
#device hifn # Hifn 7951, 7781, etc.
device random # Entropy device
device loop # Loopback
device ether # Ethernet
device pty # Pseudo-TTY
device md # Memory "disk"
device tun # Packet tunnel (required by PPP)
device bpf # Berkeley packet filter
# USB support
device ohci # OHCI PCI->USB interface
device usb # USB Bus (required)
device ugen # Generic
device uhid # "Human Interface Devices"
device ukbd # Keyboard
device ulpt # Printer
device umass # Disks/Mass storage - Requires scbus and da
# SCSI peripherals (required by USB)
device scbus # SCSI bus (required)
device da # Direct Access (disks)
device sa # Sequential Access (tape etc)
chucky# uname -a
FreeBSD chucky.my.domain 5.2.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE #2: Mon Apr 19 19:42:06 BST 2004 john at chucky.my.domain:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/SOEKRIS i386
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