Re: NetBSD on CF card

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 22:14:46 +0300
Dima Veselov <kab00m%lich.phys.spbu.ru@localhost> wrote:

> I have a task to run small i386 server which can fit on CF-card.
> I am afraid that CF card should not be used as main hard disk
> and will wear out soon.

I've been running a Powerbook entirely from a 16GB Sandisk CF card for
a long time, with no ill effects yet, in fact it outlasted quite a few
SD cards.
There are a few things you can do to avoid unnecessary writes:
- align your partitions to a largeish power-of-two value, like 16MB,
  hopefully the cards erase size will be a smaller power-of-two value
  so all filesystem blocks will be in exactly one CF block.
- mount your filesystems with noatime and nodevmtime
- put /tmp and /var/tmp in a tmpfs
- make sure you've got enough RAM so you don't need/use swap space

have fun
Michael