Rodos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Any suggestions for setting up Linux for this environment? you said it doesn't need to do any local I/O. So set it up with / mounted read-only. I did this just recently at work on a similar sounding project to you, except in solaris x86. All the bits that the OS wants to write to whilst running (like under /var/adm, /var/log, /etc and so on) are copied at the beginning of booting to /tmp and there are links from the original place to /tmp/whatever. In solaris everything under /tmp resides in memory. I didn't have any swap, a bare solaris install (37Mb), 128Mb of RAM and a 96Mb flash device as the disk. The bit that was tricky for me was the box had to be able to save some local config stuff and keep certain log files whilst still maintaining the ability to survive almost anything (eg. total power loss). It's a compact-PCI chassis (rack mounted) with redundant power supplies etc but I couldn't get around buffered writes under solaris ufs to flash so I split the flash into 5 solaris slices (one fdisk partition). s0 is root mounted read-only, and s3,s4,s5,s6 are for storing the data I want to keep. I wrote my own mini filesystem and disk manager (pretty rough) that does straight read/writes (with a max of a 5 sec buffer, it goes by time rather than bytes of data) to the raw device. So worst case is the most you'll lose is 5 secs of data. All this ensures root is always ok and the box can never get stuck on an fsck, it should also never require user intervention unless the flash itself dies. I was originally looking at using QNX/Neutrino for this rather than solaris as it doesn't have these filesystem/buffering problems but hit other problems with support for other devices we're using and lack of a C++ compiler. Dave. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in the text
