Slashdot Mirror
CompactBSD for Embedded Projects
miggidy_mac writes "FatPort (a wireless Internet service provider in Vancouver, BC) just released CompactBSD. It's a set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burns it onto compact flash (or similar) so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform (like FatPort's own FatPoint). CompactBSD takes the security and networking features of OpenBSD that we know and love, and combines them with ease-of-build and small footprint, which is great for embedded devices. Check out the project on SourceForge."
I don't know. This seems awfully familiar to PicoBSD. I guess that any "new" implementation of old technology gets press. As the adage goes, everything old is new again.
Gotta get this bad boy running on all those Javastations in my back room.
Soekris Engineering PC104 sbcs designed specificaly for Free/Net/Open BSD and the occasional Linux. Very nice they be.
Debian?
I'm not sure you can claim that any given subset of OpenBSD has the same level of security as the real thing. Presumably they're only including code that's been through a security audit, but how tested is any given configuration going to be?
--
E_NOSIG
Isnt FatPort releasing CompactBSD sorta like Tony Little selling Krispy Kremes?
windows ... but hard-crashes and hard-rebooting them wouldn't damage them as badly as the horror stories I've heard about *nix systems.
I think Windows is just quieter about what it does in recovering from hard crashes than *NIX systems, which give you options during recovery that most folks have no use for. In any event, the journaling filesystems under Linux (and the Soft Updates for BSDs) largely addresses this. Unscheduled powerdowns are usually not much of an issue with ext3.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
One has to wonder if something like this can be taken from the PC to the embedded space in general. I'm sure Wind River (the owners of BSDi) would be annoyed by something like that.
I guess we can expect a dead Jaguar real soon then?
And lots of banks and network security companies will just drop what has been working great for them for years now.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
All the embedded devices that were supposed to take off have died a dotcom death. There's the Netpliance I-Opener, the... Oh nevermind, I forgot this is Slashdot and everybody already knows about every hackable I-Appliance loss-leader hackable goodie released prior to IPO $$$ drying up.
I guess a nice small flashable *NIX distro would be great for making your own homebrew NAT box or router, but isn't there already a Linux distro (Linux router project? Must oogle google for that one later...) for this purpose? Oh well, diversity breeds creativity (according to a Disney employment ad, and the mouse never lies) so this has to be a GOOD THING.
Seriously though, one of my friends runs FreeBSD on his NAT box/file server and keeps touting it as better/easier/faster/sex life improving/more robust than Linux. Since I've set up MY Linux NAT box/file server, I haven't had to mess with it much and I really just think of it as a steady workhorse that does its job day after day without much fanfare. The only thing I can imagine BSD could improve is my sex life, but it's not working for my friend either so I think he's a liar.
In summary...
Small specialized BSD, Beer and Linux = Good
RIAA, DMCA, AOL and FIRE = BAD
(oh, lordy, when will I ever learn to stop fanning the flames???)
fifth sigma, inc.
that your little poem,
was nothing more,
than *BSD trolling.
http://www.apple.com/switch/
Your friend is obviously coming on to you in the hopes of improving *both* of your sex lives.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Quick, better tell this guy!
From your MIT link... We have run benchmarks to measure filesystem performances. Benchmarks have been made on a middle-end PC, based on a i486DX2 processor, using 16 MB of memory and two 420 MB IDE disks. The tests were run on Ext2 fs and Xia fs (Linux 1.1.62) and on the BSD Fast filesystem in asynchronous and synchronous mode (FreeBSD 2.0 Alpha--based on the 4.4BSD Lite distribution).
Hey! Way to beat us BSD fans senseless with modern benchmarks! You must have looked around a fair bit to come up with this golden oldie!
I can't be bothered looking at the postscript if it's anything as compelling as you're first effort at this Troll disguised as information.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
emBSD has been around for a while, and is built on OpenBSD too. -Yes, it's targeted towards firewalls, but can be used for more.
Hey, not that long ago, I ran a web server on an i486DX/33 with 20MB RAM (16MB + 4MB) and a 320MB hard drive. It served static pages through a 56k dial-up link. It worked just fine, even when half the hardware in the machine failed. It just enough to get the job done, and that's all you really need, right?
Too bad that I had to throw all my 486s in the trash when I moved. They were great fun to play with.
It is also worth checking out IEI. Check out the embeded single board computers. Embeded SBC There is quite a variety of socket370, transmeta, and NS Geode boards. For ordering boards in Canada contact Tri-M. Not all boards are listed on the website but most are listed in the pdf price list(in USD). I have not ordered anything from these guys yet. I am considering a ISS-102R-300 board, with 3 ethernet, and NS Geode 300mhz, for $275 USD. Or possibly one of the compact socket 370 boards.
It just fsck's it's drives, and goes on it's merry way.
WISP-Dist has similar targets, and runs on 8 Mb flash/16 Mb RAM.
BSD software can be re-released under the GPL license. It can even be re-released as a closed-source only binary. The BSD license permits that.
The FatPoint is also known as OpenBrick in Europe. I made a Debian image wich can fit on a compact flash and wich can also do a wireless access point. That's really impressive all we can do with this little box.
It's OpenBSD stripped down on what is essentially a 300MHz i386 PC. OpenSSH is on it by default, just like OpenBSD.
Though you would probably want to upgrade it to OpenSSH 3.4 because of the recent security holes.
So SSH tunnelling would be done exactly as it would on any other OpenSSH platform.
So the tools themselves are GPL'd, while the BSD files are still under the BSD license.
This does bring up a good point... has anybody built a "meta-CVS", a mechanism where I can do a CVS checkout from a public repository, diff the checkout against the one I did yesterday, and then check-in to my own private CVS showing the date, the purported actual change/committer, and the real diff between the two code revs?
If "the entire OpenBSD tree was modified", a simple DIFF would tell the story. I have every OpenBSD release set since 2.4, each of which includes a full source tree.
It would be trivial to do a straight file-for-file diff between the Kernel sources for 2.9/3.0/3.1/current and see exactly what changed and approximately when, and compare this to what CVS claims was officially changed.
Migrated "away" to what platform?Assuming you can find checkouts for the appropriate time range, doing Diff's for the core kernel code between November 2001 and January 2002 should not be a huge task. But I'm not going to put the effort in on the word of an "anonymous coward".
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
NevyOS is a full desktop distro built off of the QT/emb toolkit - preview release 1 was 8 MB total. It runs all out of the kernel framebuffer so it is wicked fast on even the slowest hardware. There were mailing list posts .saying they were going GPL in preview release 2, due in a matter of weeks. The site. has just went down for construction, so expect the big announcement soon.
AE
I don't believe it uses the CF except for loading the OS at boot time. It partitions off parts of memeory and mounts them as the filesystem. /usr, /var/ and /etc are kept in a file called /stand/mfs.tgz and loaded into those memory mount points at boot time.
CompactBSD uses the BSD license with the advertising clause which I understand is not GPL compatible..?
I can vouch for the argument about Windows just keeping quiet to reduce user angst.
I've recently encountered a very unsavoury consequence with Windows 2000 and power loss (on a laptop running off mains without a battery.) While it has been argued that NTFS (a log based file system) doesn't need fsck (chkdsk) after a crash... I can assure you, from bitter experience, that sometimes it does! The good news is that I could boot from the CD to a console and run chkdsk which made an appropriate repair... not a pleasant experience.
Whatever happened to the experimental transactional file system (Tux?)?