cli guru needed

[Bazooka Joe]

>
> I have set up literally hundreds of CF cards for embedded systems.
>
> My final approach was to give the VM the usb raw device as its disk drive
> and install directly to it.
>
> All I had to do 'postinstall' was run mkinitrd and add the ide and scsi
> drivers to the command line, so it would boot in literally anything
> supported by the kernel.
>
> I used the kvm VM for this because of its simplicity for me.  YMMV.
>
> Pop in the CF card and watch it mount.  Verify the drive id with df, then
> unmount it.
>
> This example assumes that the CF card was mounted as /dev/sdbX.
>
> # qemu-kvm -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso -net nic -net
> user -m 1024 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.img -append "text
> ks=http://10.1.10.197/ks/ks"
>
> For me, I can kickstart a small custom Fedora or Centos build in about 7
> minutes, and pop it into an embedded device and boot it.
>

Phil, very interesting.

What do you do to minimize writes to the cf card? Or is it not that
big of a prob?

I have turned off swap.