[Soekris] "Squashed" versions of FreeBSD

[Jed Clear]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Brett Glass wrote:
> Several years ago, I developed several embedded systems using
> "PicoBSD," a "squashed" version of FreeBSD. I then was diverted
> from embedded UNIX development for a few years and am finally
> returning to it. I need to upgrade/revamp some of my older work and
> then develop some new things. I'd like to use a derivative of
> FreeBSD 7.0 (or the upcoming 7.1), and need to come up to speed on
> the various existing schemes for reducing FreeBSD 7.x to manageable
> size and putting it on a CF card. All of the systems I'll be
> developing will need to be configured remotely, and I may need to
> do remote firmware updates, so I'm especially interested in schemes
> which accommodate these things. I expect to build the systems
> around Soekris boards, PC-compatible "set top boxes," or similar hardware.
>
> So far, I've seen two possibilities: "miniBSD" and a "nanoBSD". Are
> there others of which I should be aware? What are their pros and
> cons? How does each of them handle issues involving
> nonvolatile/read-only media vs. read/write media? Are good "howtos"
> and architecture papers available for them, so that I do not have
> to reverse engineer them to fully understand how they work? Any
> input would be MUCH appreciated.

I'm using nanoBSD on a 5501-70 and it works fine.  I am using FreeBSD 6.3
as the base, though.  And I didn't find any problems finding pointers on
how to get it running.  Probably the biggest problem I see with is that
you have to "roll your own" to add non-base ports or packages.  Not that
it's hard to do, but it seems like a prime candidate to add to the stock
nanoBSD build process.

I did have the luxury of writiing the CF card on my build server the first
time, but you should be able to leverage the PXEboot if you need to load
the CF card with the 5501 the first time.  nanoBSD is designed to only use
half your CF at a time, allowing subsequent updated images to be loaded in
the other half and then boot over when complete.

This will get you rolling:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/howto.html

-Jed