Out of curiosity, why are you trying to do this?
A very valid question, I work in Sun's OEM Software organization, and for the first time we are seeing real opportunities for Solaris as an embedded OS for appliances. Countless Linux devices boot from flash in a matter of seconds and just work. Why can't Solaris do the same thing? We are being asked by our PC OEMs for ideas as to how Solaris might fit in this market. This is admittedly an exercise; we need to become more knowledgeable about embedding Solaris and I was looking for an application that is currently unique to Solaris, and thought I'd take a crack at creating a "poor man's thumper". So currently:
o I've got a modified Solaris miniroot with ZFS functionality which takes up about 60 MB (The compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB). Solaris boots entirely into RAM. From poweron to full functionality, it takes about 45 seconds to boot on a very modest 1GHz Cyrix Mini ITX motherboard.
o As Solaris runs entirely in RAM, there is no Solaris footprint on the attached storage. It is entirely dedicated to ZFS. With a little kludgery, all state can be managed from ZFS in effect making Solaris stateless. There should be no serious ramifications to pulling the plug on this device. In fact that's pretty much how this thing is rebooted right now.
o As a potential example, one might consider managing this device via a web-based interface, perhaps not all that different than the way you might manage say, a Linksys router.
Yeah I know this is silly, but it's fun. Time to get back to my real job -- Jim C
Cheers, - jonathan
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