Re: "nanobsd" prototype

Regarding the remarks:

 Poul-Henning Kamp:
 > As I understand it picoBSD has never managed the 4.x->5.x transition...

 Luigi Rizzo:
 > what do you mean ? it builds happily last time i tried (sometime
 > in january) except for the usual bloat issues that the boot
 > floppies have too.


Up until the last few months I routinely built picobsd
under 5.x, PicoBSD seemed to work fine under 5.x for me.
Things seemed pretty indistinguishably from building it
under 4.x. You have to use your own configurations, which
for many (most?) interesting projects you have to do
anyway. I'll have to test it with the latest -current
as soon as I have a chance...

What DOESN'T work -- in the sense of not fitting on a
floppy -- are the old "reference configurations" other
than "release/picobsd/bridge" (and even there you may
need to remove ssh, or build the picobsd-ssh port first).
(I think "router" may work as well, it is important because
it does not use "init).  The core problem is the images
are just too big to fit on floppy because the underlying
FreeBSD system has grown.  There's been size growth
everywhere.  I think, didn't the last version of DHCP not
even fit on a floppy? The MII NIC driver stuff alone made
the drivers questionably large, IIRC...

splitfs will likely make a lot of this moot. However, it
is nice to have everything fit on a floppy, because then
you can run a ancient floppy PC as a cheap firewall and
just leave the flopy in and it will automatically reboot
unattended on power failure.

However, you can build a picobsd system of any size and
pxeboot it, or heck, just copy it to your "/" and boot
it.  Nice if your "/" is a small flash device. 

The old reference configurations that don't work for
version 5.x also don't work for versions of 4.x past
FreeBSD 4.4. I believe it was 4.4 when most of the ref
configs ran out of space to fit on floppy. The most likely
use of the configurations currently are as examples of
what works and doesn't in syntax of crunch files,
"floppy.tree.exclude" files, and the like.

Given current directions with respect to small-sensor
nets, embedded mobile devices, and flash-based systems,
picobsd is a capability that FreeBSD should definitely
retain. This doesn't mean it's not a very specific tool.
Something like NanoBSD is definitely what's needed for
folks that want to run Java off of Compact Flash (I was
talking to one such just today...) and otherwise use
FreeBSD in full.  

PicoBSD is still a good way to get a functioning TCP/IP
stack off a very small boot device. And I have used the
ability to conveniently e-mail entire PicoBSD systems as
bootable e-mail attachments to folks across the country
to debug (hardware) under hardware ICE machines.

I had some students play with PicoBSD a few months ago,
playing with small firewall configurations building on
floppies under 4.8(?). You could tell it was one of the
most exciting things they'd done on FreeBSD.

Also, the picobsd rc scripts are very small and easy to
customize. Much easier for an EE-type embedded engineer
to understand and get into than full FreeBSD.  An interesting
place for some grad-student types to start.  Also (it's
not so pronounced in this day and age of loadable modules),
the picobsd development cycle, if you are not using
floppies (netbooting or using flash) can be very fast
compared to working with FreeBSD.

Having both picobsd and nanobsd, visibly used at different
points in the low-end compact flash space, provide a
viable FreeBSD rationale when in the Linux Embedded
world.... so it would be nice if they were somehow rooted
in the same place in src.


BTW, I have consistently run into confusion about PicoBSD
(and already about nanobsd) being an alternate "Distribution".
To emphasize that they are alternate system build procedures
and not distributions, I'd like to suggest revising an
old name, and perhaps calling them "sysgen tools", or
"sysgen scripts". But that's just one opinion and term,
maybe something else would fit better.


 - bruce