cli guru needed

Phil Meyer pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com
Mon Aug 3 14:25:48 UTC 2009


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.




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