FreeBSD's embedded agenda

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <472414CE-94E8-4C8A-9586-DCA9E02A53C3 at netgate.com>
            Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> writes:
: 
: On May 25, 2006, at 1:24 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
: 
: > Platforms
: > ---------
: >
: > I386 goes without saying.
: >
: > AMD64 may have an embedded future in the high end segment, keeping
: > it "unbloated" is a concern.
: >
: > ARM is going great according to Jean-Mark and Warner, and we are
: > looking for a cheap (< $200) reference platform to point people at.
: 
: These are available.  Someone else was asking (privately) for sub- 
: $100, which is (much) more difficult.

There's many sub $100 MIPS boards available that have enough
resourses, barely, for a minimal system to boot/run on.

: > NanoBSD caters only to the "run read-only from flash" area, call
: > it if you will the "soekris" area.  I need to investigate if it
: > makes sense to use the FreeSBIE framework to build nanobsd images.
: 
: All soekris boards have CF, which looks, for all the world like an  
: IDE drive.
: 
: "real" flash is quite different.   Soekris (and the PC Engines  
: boards) are a proper subset of i386, and
: should be treated as such.

Yes.  Running off a real flash is much more difficult...

: > What can you do ?
: >
: > If you work with embedded FreeBSD, I think the best you can do is to
: > chime in to small at freebsd.org, tell us what you are doing (as far as
: > company policy will allow you), and if you have any ideas, wishes,
: > problems, let us hear about them.
: 
: I'm looking for the time to get FreeBSD running on the Gateworks  
: Xscale (arm) boards.  These are interesting to me for a couple  
: reasons, but the
: most important is that most of the boards come with a CF socket,  
: which means not having to deal with smaller flash sizes, and/or  
: dealing with a FFS
: at the FreeBSD level (for now).

Those would be a good level to start from.  Subsetting is a pain
during development, but once developed, it shouldn't be too hard to
shrink things down.  Doing it generally might be an issue...

Warner