Re: Summary: experiences with NanoBSD, successes and nits on a Soekris 4801

In message <42C587AC.7030208_at_errno.com>, Sam Leffler writes:

>> Right now there is a $24 retail price difference between the smallest
>> CF card I can buy (128M) and one that can contain a non-reduced
>> nanobsd installation (512M).  There are templates in the nanobsd
>> sources for media sizes down to 64M for people to start from.
>> 
>> I'm not saying that the problem is entirely solved, we are 90% of
>> the way there now, and the last 10% may simply not be worth it.
>
>Not to restart a thread that seems to have expired, but this attitude 
>that one can just buy a larger part is not helpful.

I think we already found out that we were in agreement here Sam:
You should read my above comment strictly in the scope of NanoBSD
and not for FreeBSD as a whole.

The idea behind NanoBSD is that you want "Basically a FreeBSD machine
but acting more like an appliance".  For that the 64MB of flash is
the minimum and the more the merrier.

The kinds of applications you talk about are usually more of the
"true embedeed" style application, where you don't really need a 
FreeBSD system, you need a kernel and some networking and would
be just as happy to never see a shell running.

In general I see four rough classes of FreeBSD targets:

"embedded"
	We can supply the handles to pull but precut or canned
	setups are probably not feasible unless as a side effect
	of somebodys work.

"appliance"
	A couple of strategic pre-canned
	versions of nanobsd make sense.

"CDROM"
	Portable workstation, recovery, diagnosis etc etc.
	FreeSBIE basically.

"Regular"
	sysinstall and its ilk.

I belive we need to cater for them all, from the megabyte accesspoint
to the petabyte server, and I would love if we can have a lot of
code reuse across the range of build/install tools for these.

But as always, how much happens in one corner or the other depends
on somebody pouring time into it.

-- 
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FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.