Re: FreeBSD's embedded agenda

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.

> 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.

> For now it seems that everybody who works in this "really small"
> area do their own thing, and nobody directly volunteered to try
> to do a framework for this kind of thing.
>
> An important footnote in this area is that we need to exploit the
> new generalized WITH_FOO/WITHOUT_FOO build framework to make life
> easier for embedded systems when new major feature sets come in.
> I intend to maintain the build-option survey to help with this.

David Cornejo did some excellent work with picoBSD that resembles this.

> 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).

Jim