Re: NetBSD on embedded devices

[Jukka Marin <jukka.marin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 01:47:52PM +0200, r0ller wrote:
> Hi Jukka,
> 
> Well, I'm no expert in that but you may be interested in this video
> presented by khorben and ask him:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdhHcMFpKo

Thanks, but I hope to start from a bit "higher" level than this :)


On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 04:06:17PM -0400, Ron Georgia wrote:
> jm,
> I have two of those units. Is that the ???embedded system??? you are
> going to install NetBSD on? If so you definitely do not need a
> ???stripped down??? version.

Well yes, I know - I have ran a full linux distribution on these.
But I want to minimize the image size to make updates faster and
easier.  I also want to remove all software that is not required
for the application to maximize reliability and security.

I called this "embedded" because the system will be a headless
server with functionality limited to one application only.

> I have one running my pfsense firewall and
> it hardly breaks a sweat. The other has had NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and
> now DragonflyBSD installed on it. I have 8Gig of RAM and two hard drives
> installed. One thing I have to say, under FreeBSD it ran really hot.
> NetBSD 7.1 was installed with no problem and ran without incident for a
> good while and ran hot, but not where I needed mittens to handle it.

What does the CPU temperature sensor report?  Mine says 43°C, but the
box is in a warm room (I guess 25°C or more).  I have 4 GB RAM, an LTE
modem, and a 512 GB mSATA disk installed.

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 04:55:05PM +0200, xpetrl wrote:
> Amazing project!
> 
> If I can give you and advice, you can consider PC-Engine (pcengine.ch)
> for a
> real embedded hardware: PC-Engine is largely used for Router, firewall with
> good supported hardware for any BSD. They are low powered, configurable and
> use a serial line as debug.

It seems to use a CF card - I want a SATA disk because I need to run
some kind of a database on the box (probably sqlite).  I know there are
industrial grade CF cards, but they are pretty expensive per megabyte.


The firmware update process is what I'm mostly wondering about..

  -jm