[time-nuts] 5370 processor boards available

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Thu Feb 27 10:12:45 EST 2014


On 2/27/14 6:40 AM, Didier Juges wrote:
> The BBB has 2GB of flash on board (non removable) and has a micro SD socket. Would not be too hard to keep a backup copy of the OS and apps on the SD card so that it would be easy to boot from SD and reload the built-in flash if the BBB fails to boot from the built-in image.
>  Alternately, running the flash read only, copy OS, apps and everything else to a RAM disk and run from the RAM disk would probably be the safest. Not sure you can do that with 512MB of RAM without some serious pruning of the Linux kernel.
>


Back in 2004, I was running a stripped down linux off a small compact 
flash (256MB or 512MB, I think) on a VIA Eden 700 MHz motherboard with 
very limited RAM.  It included busybox to provide the usual command line 
utilities. As I dimly recall, it booted from a compressed filesystem (on 
CF) to ramdisk only. I also had a version of Debian that net-booted, and 
also ran entirely in ram.

I could probably dig it up if someone's interested.

We run RTEMS (www.rtems.org) at work, which provides a Posix compliant 
interface, but is designed for embedded systems, and has a bunch of 
targets (ours is SPARC, but there's x86 versions, for sure).  You can 
definitely fit that in well under 128 MB.

We've found that most everything that compiles and runs under Linux will 
compile/run under RTEMS, unless you're using something peculiar to 
Linux, or you need dynamic loading/linking (RTEMS is statically linked). 
  That is, we have very few "#ifdef LINUX" kind of things in our code.



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