[plug] initrd

[Brad Campbell]

Shayne O'Neill wrote:
> Yeah. I used to do a little embedded work (hated it. the dev/test cycle is
> painfully slow, and the toolchain is sparse as hell). You really only need
> this;-
> 
> Kernel. (Try the ucLinux if you can. Its tiny , but thread/fork support
> sucks)
> uclibc or glibc. again uclib is tiny, but its not featureful.
> busybox, with apropriate symlinkage.
> 
> and maybe boa webserver.
> 
> I'd suggest grabbing axis's distro for its axis development kits. You'd
> have to screw around retargeting the kernel back to i386 , but its
> probably just some tweaks to config. But that little sucker fits the whole
> lot in under a meg, boots almost instant (10 seconds thereabouts..
> admitedly off flashrom) and 'just works'.
> 
> add in sshd, and even smb for cleverness, and its a really useful kit :)
> 

I used to have an initrd that used two kernel monte to boot a second kernel (Allowed easy kernel 
updates over the network), A full busybox, Acme labs mini_httpd, Xfree, Wine and my win32 
application all in less than 15MB compressed. It used to expand to a ram disk and run completely 
from ram. Boot time off CF card was 45 seconds to a complete running system. It sat on a VIA 
mini-ITX board behind a microtouch or elotouch LCD touch screen.

I miss doing that kind of work :p(

Brad