Hello all,

I have an "Embedded Box IPC" that I want to use for executing a handful of simple, recurring automation tasks. In case you are curious, the specific device I am using is: http://www.advantech.com/products/AR...1C638B492.aspx

Please note that while this device is a pile of garbage by today's standards, it is actually overkill for the automation purposes I am using it for.

Device specs: 2 GB SD Flash Memory (Hard disk), 64 MB RAM, 150 MHz processor

I've messed around with several flavors of Linux and Slackware 12 is the best one I have found that works with this device (shell only, no UI stuff)

As the device uses a SD Flash card for the hard disk, I want to minimize read/writes to it. Googling, I think what I want is a "Ram disk"?

I envision the system booting, loading from the SD Flash card into RAM. After the files are loaded to RAM, everything executes from RAM (no reads or writes to the SD Flash card for /tmp, or other files.

A bare bones configuration is preferred. I need to maintain network support (the tool I wrote for issuing the automation commands requires tcp/ip) as does the SSH Daemon I use to configure the device.

Any suggestions or advice on how to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Adam

I believe you can edit your /etc/fstab to run the parts of your computer in RAM.

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I think the easiest way to do that is to put the entire rootfs inside an initrd/initramfs.

Slackware would have to be stripped down pretty good to run inside 64 MB of RAM though.
Maybe you can start with initrd.img from the installer and add what you need to it.

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Thanks for that tip.

I think 64Mb of RAM are needed to *run* a barebone slack, it surely won't be room enough to load also an image of the OS.

If you are interested in reducing the I/O on the drive, have a look at this article, it's written for debian but most of the things apply also to slack.

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/linux-on-flash.html

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I think the only parts of the file system that need to be writable are /var and /tmp the rest of it should be able to mounted read only and thus avoid excessive writes to the flash card.

/tmp can just be mounted at boot time via fstab as it is considered to be an unsafe storage area between reboots
/var is the hard one as it requires state data to be maintained across reboots

So you can either go with the easy method and start the system with a default /var from install or you can edit the scripts some more and save /var over the reboot to maintain the state data.

EDIT: Memory and Slackware 12.0, 64MB is quite a lot so this should work.

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You can compresso all your slackware on a squashfs image, that you mount on ram.
only you have to create an initrd at boot.

I did it with an old version of slack. I installed just the A set then I think a few packages from N and such. I did as you and googles linux ramdrive then set that up early. So I would just find the init script where root was remounted r/w and remark that line then reboot and watch to see where it failed then mount my flash card in another system and remark out that line.
A few things I wanted like /var/log/messages I would just link to the ram drive so I had to touch the files right after creating the ramdrive so the links would be valid.
I probably still have that flash card laying in my drawer, will have to look.

I cannot really contribute with any hints or tips, how to do it, but you might have a look at a live distro and see, how they do it. Good examples with relatively small footprint appear to be Puppy, Tiny Core and SLAX. New, but possibly also interesting is Porteus.

SLAX and Porteus are based on Slackware, so they might be the first to look at.

Good luck!

gargamel