[talk] Fwd: flashrd 2.0

[George Rosamond]

FYI.

I mentioned flashrd at the installfest in January.  This is the first
release in a while.

Haven't touched the new one yet, but it's a nice light OpenBSD system
that even works well on ancient Soekris 4801s, with an easy upgrade method.

g


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: flashrd 2.0
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 13:20:50 -0800
From: Chris Cappuccio <chris at nmedia.net>
To: flashrd at lists.130collective.org

The mailing list moved to a new server. I don't have an MLM up, and
Fred Cirera can no longer host the list, so Tim Howe volunteered to
host it.

The new list address is:

flashrd at lists.130collective.org

In reference to the last message on the list,

http://lists.130collective.org/pipermail/flashrd/2015-October/000173.html

the latest flashrd is now ready for consumption.

Version 2.0 includes a number of improvements from Brian Conway and
Fred Cirera. I also fixed a bug thanks to a tip from Kenneth
Westerback. I was abusing the vnd driver to create sparse backing
store files. The sparse file support was intended to allow use of
sparse files, not to create them. This bug was brought to light by
various changes in vnd support over the past few releases.

This version fixes all known (to me) issues with various kernel
layouts not booting up. This fix was described in the email referenced
above; it is in an OpenBSD driver, not in flashrd.

Brian and Fred also improved a number of other areas, including
allowing /etc to be a untarred to tmpfs on boot (tardir support),
/var/tmp support for newer system versions, 4MB alignment for cheap
flash (not sure how much this buys us, but the cost is small), no
more building the bootstrap with PIE (unsupported on i386, so
i386 release was broke in flashrd 1.9).

Thanks Brian and Fred for your efforts!

I put up images based on OpenBSD 5.9 "pre-release". OpenBSD 5.9 isn't
finalized yet, but we are past the "5.9-beta" tag.

This version of OpenBSD includes significant networking improvements,
speed improvements, Xen guest support, and more that may be
interesting to flashrd users.

I'm loading this release on a number of ALIX (i386) and Core 2 Duo
Supermicro w/USB (amd64) boxes right now...
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