On 08/03/2009 01:07 AM, Bazooka Joe wrote:
> 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.
I have cards in the field that have been running now for three years
with no errors, with a swap partition.
I have tested cards by running an intensive database (11disk/i/o per
second) for over a week, with no disk errors. Current CF cards are fine
for this stuff, but can be made to last even longer by doing a livecd to
the CF. It depends upon expected work loads.