Running Linux on a flash drive
Bob Chiodini
chiodr at kscems.ksc.nasa.gov
Tue Aug 31 10:50:32 UTC 2004
On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 15:01, Mike Westkamper wrote:
> I am working on making Linux (FC2) run on a flash disk.
>
> To avoid the write-cycle limits on the flash it must be configured without a
> swap drive and remove any extraneous logging. I have eliminated the swap
> partition, however I am not sure what logs are created and how to eliminate
> them or direct them to /dev/nul. The objective is not to beat the flash to
> death since there is a 1 million write cycle limit.
>
Mike,
Add noatime to your mount options in fstab. If possible mounting your
flash file systems read-only will eliminate the write-cycle limits. I'm
still working on that part. This is my fstab:
/dev/msys/fla2 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
tmpfs /var tmpfs defaults,size=8M 0 0
/dev/msys/fla1 /boot msdos defaults,ro,noatime 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk auto noauto,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/usbdisk2 auto noauto,noatime 0 0
> I am also trying to make the kernel static, w/o modules, to keep the speed
> up as the flash is slow. Here my attempts have been less that acceptable. I
> constantly get errors on the build and can't seem to eliminate all the
> modules.
>
This might not be that important. The two embedded projects here are
both based on the same OS build, but use different ethernet
controllers. I built the drivers as modules and alias them in
modules.conf as appropriate for each system. Here is the output of
lsmod for one of the systems:
Module Size Used by Not tainted
arcom-0.41 8896 2
usb-ohci 19872 0 (unused)
usbcore 73600 1 [usb-ohci]
eepro100 20428 1
mii 3832 0 [eepro100]
msdos 6940 1 (autoclean)
fat 37400 0 (autoclean) [msdos]
doc 160128 2
This board has a built-in eepro interface.
> Finally, to use some sort of sleep mode to avoid the re-boot delay on the
> re-application of power. Once developed the system will not ever see any
> different configuration. Here I can't find much information on how to do
> this.
>
I'd like this too!
Bob...
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