[Soekris] CF card and MFS

[Jeff Quast]

On 11/8/06, Bill Maas <bill at stsx.org> wrote:
> Here's a handy tip to all who are using a CF card on
> a Soekris running OpenBSD: if you have to retrieve a
> large chunk of data from which you only need a few
> files, e.g. a CVS module or a tarball, set up an MFS
> partition that will fit the contents and check out the
> module or untar the tarball onto the MFS. Things will
> go a lot faster, and you don't have to worry about
> your CF's write cycles;)
>
> Bill
>

I use a permenent mfs /tmp for this very reason. But remember the very
small amount of memory these machines have!! You have a (very small)
limit to the size it can be, especially since roughly 85% of the
memory of a soekris is available after the kernel has had its
reservations.

luckily, the mfs driver will only consume as much memory as the
filesystem is using. So I create a 32mb mfs /tmp, and for the most
part it consumes less than 100K of memory.

Also, you can extract a single file from a tarball, e.g:
tar xzpf etc40.tgz etc/rc

(if you use tar with real tapes, this is invaluable!)