[plug] Mini-ITX Systems...

[Brad Campbell]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
> 
> *nod*
> Knoppix includes about 1.8Gig of stuff on a compressed ISO, and boots quite
> fast, considering it's off CD.
> Big flash cards are still bloody expensive. I'm trying to keep my project on
> the cheap side. ^_^
> 
> > > How fast would it be before X? ie; for a text only session?
> >
> > Err.. Well because the entire system is in RAM, X takes about 1 second
> > to start up, so not much quicker really. (This is on a 1Ghz Celeron)
> 
> So you expand the card drive into a RAM disk then? (Rather than just mount the
> compressed drive image directly off the Flash)

Yep, I have a minimal e2fs on the CF card that contains a
staticly compiled busybox, my init shell script and a dir full
of .tgz's. The init script checks to see if there is an updated kernel
.tgz, if so it uncompresses it into a tmpfs filesystem and does a two
kernel monte boot with that.
Next time round it mounts up a tmpfs filesystem, then uncompresses all
the .tgz into it and does a pivot_root, then execs init.

The great part about doing it this way is I can have a network upgrade
function with a failsafe boot system that never changes, and I can
upgrade the kernel without having to re-lilo the CF card.
Also the base system is stored on an ext2 partition so when the "boys"
put the CF card into a laptop to configure the system, the base system
is safe from casual tampering and stuffing up. All user config is stored
on a fat32 partition.

After the system is running, the CF card gets un-mounted and can be
removed (This is why I need a hotswap enabled CF slot) as the software
allows you to pop the card out, re-configure it, pop it back in and
only re-start the services that the config has changed for. So no reboots
for config changes, just service reloads that take all of 1 second.

-- 
Brad....
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