On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
I run SL5 on 6 machines, and am considering building a low power
browsing/email machine running SL5. It will probably use an Atom
mini-ITX board and a 30GB solid state drive - no moving parts, and
using less than 40 watts. I will do the usual /tmp in ramdisk
and "noatime" in /etc/fstab, among other flash-friendly tweaks.
Although the boot partition will be ext2/3 , I am considering
making the main partition with the JFFS file system - the
Journalling Flash File System. That is not built into the
SL5 kernel ... it is a module instead. I'm wondering if the
system will be able to find the JFFS module if /etc and /lib
and /bin are stored as JFFS. Probably not. Does anyone know?
I can compile my own kernel, of course, but I lose the advantage
of automated updates. I can also build the main partition with
ext2/3, and move the frequently varying stuff like /var and
/home into separate JFFS partitions. I would rather use JFFS
for as much as I can, though. Updates could be extremely slow
if too much of the system is ext2/3 .
Ideas?
As the /boot will be ext2/3 then you probably just need to ensure that the
jffs modules are included in the base set of modules which get built into
the initrd when that gets built after a kernel install.
The mkinird script tries to guess which modules are needed to be able to
mount the root (etc) fs - e.g. loading scsi drivers etc, so it ought to be
able to make it work though you might need to tweak modprobe.conf (or
something else) to ensure that it gets included).
-- Jon
