On Thursday 15 March 2007 02:45 am, Roland Mainz wrote: > Still embedded applications should have a small(-er) runtime footprint. > Smaller is (usually) better (and as I said we're going to do more work > on the footprint part in ksh93 after the initial putback).
I agree, I am just wondering how useful OpenSolaris would be with it's substantially larger kernel. Not that it would be a problem, just pointing out there is a difference. I have a device that has 8mb on ROM, and 8mb/16mb of NAND. The ROM was originally developed on NAND, then a ROM was created with that image. The device boots the ROM, check the NAND image against what on the server, and if the image is new, reflashes the NAND and reboots ROM which loads the NAND. These 8mb-ROM/16mb-NAND devices were pretty popular a few years ago, but the storage and memory has been driven up in the past few years. Even if BusyBox was ported, Solaris still requires a fair amount of space, but I don't know exactly what that is. It is definitely more than Linux in this regard. The other consideration is that most of the embedded devices use processors without float. This is often to get low power requirements. My device has a PPC 823, and the PPC 405 which I believe is the sister chipset also doesn't have floating point. I wonder how Solaris would run without a floating point processor? Linux is pretty slow in itself, or slower. Once these devices are boot and you can NFS attach to a server, the world is your oyster...because at that point there is no real storage limit, you can mount your home directory on another machine...mysql clients, all types of stuff you can do with a small embedded device, and most opensource will surprisingly compile with the soft-float option. Live everything else, I believe something like this would need to be driven by someone that has a device they want to get OpenSolaris booting on. I am interested, but not with the device(s) I have, none have the power/storage to run OpenSolaris. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group Advocate of insourcing at Sun - hire people that care about our company! _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
