[talk] some notes on flashrd

[George Rosamond]

George Rosamond:
> flashrd (www.nmedia.net/flashrd) has been around a long long time.  It
> is a light weight build system for embedded OpenBSD for flash media. It
> was created and is maintained by Chris Cappuccio, among others.
> 
> The current image at images/20150320 doesn't boot due to PIE settings,
> but I can provide an image if anyone's interested until it's resolved. I
> also have a build script that isn't quite elegant shell (yet), but it
> does simplify configuring a build. Importantly, the build machine must
> match the platform, so to build i386, you need an i386 box, unless
> you're using a virtualized build system.
> 
> Lots of funky features, such as switching between read-only and
> read-write modes, the use of vnodes, etc.
> 
> I started hacking on it last week.  There's a certain simplicity that is
> nice.  I imagine that if FreeBSD's Crochet was limited to one board, the
> two build systems would have a lot in common.
> 
> My build is only using bsd*.tgz and etc*.tgz files.  Adding a swap file
> is vital to do anything interesting with a Soekris of course.
> 
> What's truly impressive is that I pulled out two ancient Soekris 4801s
> with that potent 266mhz CPU and 128M of RAM, and it works fine.
> 
> Remote upgrades and fallback to the previous configuration if any
> problems is simple and straight-forward.
> 
> There are regular DMA errors when booting off old CF cards.  I'm having
> an issues forcing PIO mode and disabling DMA, as the changes to the
> kernel don't seem to stick from UKC.  Any input appreciated.
> 
> boot> boot -c
> 
> wd* flags changed to 0x0ffc and 0x0ff0, but neither sticks after a reboot.
> 

Duh, my bad... been a while since I changed kernel parameters with
config(8)...

www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#config

> Anyways, worth checking out as a solution for small systems.

g