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BSD Operating Systems

CompactBSD for Embedded Projects 151

Posted by michael from the bsd-inside dept.
miggidy_mac writes "FatPort (a wireless Internet service provider in Vancouver, BC) just released CompactBSD. It's a set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burns it onto compact flash (or similar) so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform (like FatPort's own FatPoint). CompactBSD takes the security and networking features of OpenBSD that we know and love, and combines them with ease-of-build and small footprint, which is great for embedded devices. Check out the project on SourceForge."
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CompactBSD for Embedded Projects More

CompactBSD for Embedded Projects

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  • PicoBSD? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cliffy2000 ( 185461 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @08:31PM (#4131177) Journal
    I don't know. This seems awfully familiar to PicoBSD [freebsd.org]. I guess that any "new" implementation of old technology gets press. As the adage goes, everything old is new again.

  • Let's hope... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... the leave out the experimental sshd code
    that openbsd loves to run by default, and
    contributed to a remote root explote. Me, I'd
    prefer old 2.x era sshd.
  • Gotta get this bad boy running on all those Javastations in my back room.

  • Perhaps in conjunction w/ one of this sweet ones.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @08:33PM (#4131186)
    Soekris Engineering [soekris.com] PC104 sbcs designed specificaly for Free/Net/Open BSD and the occasional Linux. Very nice they be.

  • Security (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @09:08PM (#4131304) Homepage Journal
    I'm not sure you can claim that any given subset of OpenBSD has the same level of security as the real thing. Presumably they're only including code that's been through a security audit, but how tested is any given configuration going to be?
    • Neither can you claim it has not. By nature of complexity, bloat does rarely ADD security or correctness. Bloat is the correct term for all that stuff not needed in embedded world.

      And as for stripped OpenBSD by Henning Brauer I would be be damn sure it is even more secure than the real thing given the context it is made for (namely removing binaries which are supposed to not be run in a given config).

      The security audit got to the parts which remain the same no matter where other parts went. In fact Your point is only valid for the rare situation of actually removing stuff (e.g. from libs) that do extra checking or other "separation" work.
  • I'm looking for a PC104 or similar system for a project i'm working on. I'd like it to be BSD based (Open or Free is fine), a VGA or SVGA out. I'd like to be able to have digital ins/outs as well as analog inputs as well. Networking would be a plus, but not necessary. Ideally, i'd like to write a GUI for this application using QT (or similar toolkit). A tinyBSD like this is a good start. Has anyone else done or know how to do something similar? Thanks in advance...
    • NevyOS is a full desktop distro built off of the QT/emb toolkit - preview release 1 was 8 MB total. It runs all out of the kernel framebuffer so it is wicked fast on even the slowest hardware. There were mailing list posts [gnu.org.in].saying they were going GPL in preview release 2, due in a matter of weeks. The site [tisya.co.in]. has just went down for construction, so expect the big announcement soon. AE
  • Anyone know if/how well this unit can do SSH tunneling?

    • Re:Wondering... (Score:2, Informative)

      by krusty_snart ( 603598 )
      No problem...

      It's OpenBSD stripped down on what is essentially a 300MHz i386 PC. OpenSSH is on it by default, just like OpenBSD.

      Though you would probably want to upgrade it to OpenSSH 3.4 because of the recent security holes.

      So SSH tunnelling would be done exactly as it would on any other OpenSSH platform.

  • Microsoft Platform Builder [microsoft.com] is a pretty good tool for configuring and building a Windows CE customized OS. It seems that CompactBSD's CLI environment is really a huge backstep in platform configuration tools.

    Leaving aside any arguments about BSD and WinCE, of course.
  • Isnt FatPort [fatport.com] releasing CompactBSD sorta like Tony Little [tonylittle.com] selling Krispy Kremes?
  • Knowing that BSD and other *nix systems usually don't like hard power-downs (this may have changed since the last time I used linux), would they really be the best things to be using in embedded devices? I mean, I know windows is the end-all be-all of EVIL(TM) operating systems, but hard-crashes and hard-rebooting them wouldn't damage them as badly as the horror stories I've heard about *nix systems. Just a question.
    • windows ... but hard-crashes and hard-rebooting them wouldn't damage them as badly as the horror stories I've heard about *nix systems.

      I think Windows is just quieter about what it does in recovering from hard crashes than *NIX systems, which give you options during recovery that most folks have no use for. In any event, the journaling filesystems under Linux (and the Soft Updates for BSDs) largely addresses this. Unscheduled powerdowns are usually not much of an issue with ext3.
      • I can vouch for the argument about Windows just keeping quiet to reduce user angst.

        I've recently encountered a very unsavoury consequence with Windows 2000 and power loss (on a laptop running off mains without a battery.) While it has been argued that NTFS (a log based file system) doesn't need fsck (chkdsk) after a crash... I can assure you, from bitter experience, that sometimes it does! The good news is that I could boot from the CD to a console and run chkdsk which made an appropriate repair... not a pleasant experience.

        Whatever happened to the experimental transactional file system (Tux?)?
    • I've switched on/off embedded pc's such as the Soekris box with OpenBSD on a compact flash without any problems.

      It just fsck's it's drives, and goes on it's merry way.

    • Knowing that BSD and other *nix systems usually don't like hard power-downs

      Correction. Most *nix file systems don't like hard power-downs. The OS itself figures you know what you're doing.

      But be that as it may, most embedded devices either have a RAM filesystem powered by battery, or don't really have a hard power-down at all.
    • I don't believe it uses the CF except for loading the OS at boot time. It partitions off parts of memeory and mounts them as the filesystem. /usr, /var/ and /etc are kept in a file called /stand/mfs.tgz and loaded into those memory mount points at boot time.
  • One has to wonder if something like this can be taken from the PC to the embedded space in general. I'm sure Wind River (the owners of BSDi) would be annoyed by something like that.
    • More to the point, the customers of Wind River will be quite happy. Wind River isn't exactly known as a customer-friendly organization.

      This doesn't seem to have such a huge effect on WR because their main product is VxWorks, not BSD.

  • Shame the embedded market is in the shape it's in (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23, 2002 @10:20PM (#4131503)
    All the embedded devices that were supposed to take off have died a dotcom death. There's the Netpliance I-Opener, the... Oh nevermind, I forgot this is Slashdot and everybody already knows about every hackable I-Appliance loss-leader hackable goodie released prior to IPO $$$ drying up.

    I guess a nice small flashable *NIX distro would be great for making your own homebrew NAT box or router, but isn't there already a Linux distro (Linux router project? Must oogle google for that one later...) for this purpose? Oh well, diversity breeds creativity (according to a Disney employment ad, and the mouse never lies) so this has to be a GOOD THING.

    Seriously though, one of my friends runs FreeBSD on his NAT box/file server and keeps touting it as better/easier/faster/sex life improving/more robust than Linux. Since I've set up MY Linux NAT box/file server, I haven't had to mess with it much and I really just think of it as a steady workhorse that does its job day after day without much fanfare. The only thing I can imagine BSD could improve is my sex life, but it's not working for my friend either so I think he's a liar.

    In summary...

    Small specialized BSD, Beer and Linux = Good
    RIAA, DMCA, AOL and FIRE = BAD
  • There are about a half dozen similar projects out and about at the moment. For one, there's the myBSD project that's creating a fifth BSD distro for very specialized projects. I personally am working on a customized version of FreeBSD, called PortoBSD, built to boot off of a CD directly into a complete OS (portable email station). This is by no means particularly special.

  • Why not just use emBSD? (Score:2, Informative)

    by draziw ( 7737 )
    emBSD [embsd.org] has been around for a while, and is built on OpenBSD too. -Yes, it's targeted towards firewalls, but can be used for more.
    • emBSD has been stalled for quite some time now.

      I've tried to use it, but it's always revisions behind the main OpenBSD development. So security fixes never really seem to make it into emBSD very quickly.

      The nice thing about this version, is that it is always based on the newest version of OpenBSD.
      It essentially downloads the current version, hacks it up so it can fit onto embedded devices, and burns everything onto a bootable compact flash card.

      Very nice...

  • a port of *BSD or Linux to my digital camera?

    Is there any way that would ever be possible? Can you boot from flash ram on those babies?
  • If you click the link, the site says License "GPL" How can a "BSD" be GPL?

    • Re:GPL?!? (Score:2, Informative)

      by dnaumov ( 453672 )
      BSD software can be re-released under the GPL license. It can even be re-released as a closed-source only binary. The BSD license permits that.

    • Re:GPL?!? (Score:3, Informative)

      by krusty_snart ( 603598 )
      This isn't really a distribution, but a set of tools to create a distribution.

      So the tools themselves are GPL'd, while the BSD files are still under the BSD license.

  • Similar project for Linux (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hazard ( 2541 )
    WISP-Dist [leaf-project.org] has similar targets, and runs on 8 Mb flash/16 Mb RAM.

  • wireless with Debian (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sebou ( 603610 )
    The FatPoint is also known as OpenBrick [openbrick.org] in Europe. I made a Debian image [openbrick.org] wich can fit on a compact flash and wich can also do a wireless access point. That's really impressive all we can do with this little box.
  • Is this just an add trying to sell hardware?
    Points us to the SourceForge page, where there are: 0 Bug listings, 0 Support Requests, 0 Patches, 0 Feature Requests. The Notes page is empty, there is no project home page, and it only has 5 downloads.
    Yes - let me rush to install this on my critical embedded systems. This story should not have been posted - on freshmeat, fine - on slashdot, it's stupid.
  • Look at the SourceForge page: It's GPLed. This means it's not a BSD.

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