Ray Leventhal wrote:
Hi all,
Advance apologies if this is OT; if so, please mail me offlist.
A client is considering using CentOS5.1 for an embedded project. They
will be booting from Compact Flash.
The CF in the device is being controlled by a VIA VT6421 SATA/RAID
controller.
Are there drivers available or must we truly 'roll our own' when
compiling the 2.6x kernel for this? I've done some searching in the
archives and on the site, but to no avail
Also, are there any pitfalls we should be aware of up front? (any
experience here is better than ours at this point!)
for an embedded linux, I'd suggest roll-your-own using uClibc, BusyBox
and a statically built kernel for your application. Most flash based
embedded systems eschew e3fs in favor of the highly compressed read only
flashFS, with a ramdrive for temporary storage, and use jffs2 if they
need a writable flash file system.
one of the goals of this sort of architecture is to minimize extraneous
writes to the flash... by running the core OS on a read only file
system like flashfs, this completely eliminates all writes there.
another goal is to reduce the total size of the OS, uClibc is far
smaller than glibc, busybox replaces most all the core shell utilities
(including the shell itself) with a single executable, the statically
linked kernel does away with modules, config files, etc. Its possible
to squeeze a completely functional system with networking services and
everything into 4 megabytes of flash.
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