On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:57:19 -0600, Jurrie Lulofs <jurrie@sackheads.org> wrote:
> I'm curious what the generally accepted best practice is wrt NetBSD
> installation and configuration.
> 
> The paper "NetBSD and handheld platforms" (written prior to the hpcmips
> port of sysinst) describes a manual installation procedure which yields a
> configuration with a single partition (without paging/swap) and with
> "noatime,nodevmtime".
> 
> Enter NetBSD 2.0 and we have an available sysinst which defaults to a
> desktop-like partitioning configuration.
> 
> The two approaches are quite different.  Using a reduced number of
> partitions makes sense to avoid over-allocating unused space on these
> disk-space-challenged machines.  The big difference is in the attempt to
> avoid/reduce the number of write operations to the flash memory devices.
> 
> Have the NetBSD hpcmips veterans on this list come down on one side of the
> fence or the other on this issue?

I'm not a "hpcmips vetran", but I have a comment.

A few years ago flash memory was expensive and small.

Now it's big and fairly cheap.

I'm making my Mobilepro 880 work much like a desktop, because I want
all that stuff on it. I want it to function as much as possible like a
"real" laptop. I have a root partition and a swap partition.

But I can see on some devices where the "embedded" method is more
relevant. Might be useful to come up wiht some smaller subset of the
distribution sets that will cover a large percentage of what you want
to do with minimal storage space. I was trying to do this myself to
get a nice install into a 256 meg memory card, but I gave up. I'll
probably buy a microdrive in either 2 or 4 gig.

Andy