On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 10:29:23AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
I think it's time we put an lguest kernel in flash, and show the world how free software does virtualization.
Yes!
This is a much simpler task than putting (e.g.) kvm in flash, as the helper for kvm (qemu) is pretty heavy: close to 4MB, whereas the lguest program which runs guests is a mere (!) 600K. And, unless we care about windows (I don't), we don't really need what kvm does.
But we're going to need 2 mbyte flash parts. I need a little guidance here, probably from Ward.
We squeeze lb + kernel with tiny patches (network but no usb) + small initrd into 1MB. With 2MB, there should be a lot of space, enough for 600K of lguest software. Is that a statically compiled copy of the lguest program, by the way?
That should leave about 400K for other stuff - how big is the lg kernel module? I guess you could pull that off disk if necessary. Perhaps a 4MB flash part would be nicer...
I want to buy a kick-ass(TM) mainboard which runs LB, is supported by buildrom, and will support 2MB flash parts. I want to buy the package from (e.g.) newegg. This will be a wiki entry when I'm done.
So:
- what board?
How about that new mini-dtx gigabyte board that the SIS folks contributed code for?
Alternatively, the gigabyte m57sli-s4; but as Torsten pointed out today there are some issues still with PCI and PCI-E (interrupts) on that board. No acpi yet either. But it's not so hard to add a second SOIC/SPI chip on the free pads on the board - we have verified instructions (thanks Peter!). We can burn SPI chips now on this board thanks to Carl-Daniels work. The board is really very nice with 6 SATA ports and lots of bells and whistles.
Uwe also added support another MCP55-based board - the MSI K9N Neo, but I think that one is hard to find now.
In any case we'll have to figure out what the largest flash part is that can be addressed by the board.
- where do I buy the flash parts
Good question. SOIC/SPI parts seem to be a bit harder to source, I've done some preliminary looking but have yet to buy some chips for the m57sli-s4 v2. Mouser?
- I need a nice quiet case. Any suggestions?
- I assume just about any old disk will do.
- any favorite video card? Cheap is better.
Any $30 or so ATI card should be fine if you're not interested in super graphics performance; the free accelerated drivers should appear sometime soon-ish...
Didn't that mini-dtx board have onboard vga? Even cheap discrete video cards draw way too much power for my taste these days, if you're not interested in 3D acceleration.
Thanks, Ward.