In message <20041019055322.GL17288@che.ojctech.com>, David Young writes:
>We are building small routers for CompactFlash.  We have an ugly script,
>'mkstaboot', that builds NetBSD, pares it down, and then installs
>routing and other software.  It is in our public source repository under
>trunk/src/boot-image/.  Available for browsing:

Cool!

What kind of size range are you targeting?  I'm trying to remember what I
had my cheapo script down to; I think I had it workable on a 64MB flash card,
but I'm lazy.  Currently, I'm just doing whole systems on 256MB cards.  Since
I'm doing small numbers, well, the cost of a 256MB SanDisk card ($30-40 mail
order) vs. the cost of time spent trying to shrink the system...

>Luke Mewburn has a framework for building small systems in src/distrib/.
>It's used for building crunched boot floppies and stuff.  My colleague
>Bryan had started converting us to that, but he had to put the work aside.

Ooh.  The crunch stuff seems a good match, at least for rarely-used binaries.

>If we can work together to make smaller CompactFlash routers, that
>would be great.

Well... Putting on my freelance writer hat, I wonder if I can sell someone
on an article series about doing it.  If I can, then I can probably justify
putting real time into it.  Hmm.

-s