Hi Folks,
I'm currently investigating options for a minimal-cost x386 based diskless
embedded controller running a stripped-down Linux kernel for a reasonably
simple embedded TCP/IP application. I'm very interested in opinions or
experience anyone could offer.
My choice of x386 is to allow easy hardware & software prototyping on desktop
PC's and off-the-shelf embedded biscuit-PC-like boards. Ultimately, I'd like to
build a tiny BIOS-less system with traditional (i.e. non-IDE) flash/eprom
memory and minimal RAM. Since the Linux kernel has a larger footprint than
traditional embedded OS's, it would be nice to run it directly from ROM with
a ROM-based root filesystem. I'd prefer not to simply copy the kernel into RAM
or use an "initrd" RAM-disk for root filesystem stuff which is all essentially
read-only. Demonstrating that Linux can run embedded with very little RAM is
one of the goals here, even at the expense of slightly more ROM.
My guess is that much of the specifics here can be handled by a ROM-based
bootloader which sets up the x386 MMU to effectively "load" the kernel, and
from then on everything is much like running in a desktop box, albeit a
severely stripped one. Does anyone know of an existing bootloader that can
perform this sort of magic, or any other pointers to existing solutions?
Thank you,
Graham
