[SOLVED] NanoBSD?

[stephenw10]

Hi all.
Is there an intention to have a NanoBSD variant at all? My test boxes are all booting CF at the moment.

Steve

[ariel]

 I'll be testing in a VM but at the end my production machine (where this gonna be installed) is running from CF too so, same question, there are plans to create a NanoBSD version?

[jschellevis]

Hi stephenw10 and ariel,

Thank you for your feedback.
We will release an embedded version soon as there seems to be quite a demand for it.

You should be able to install the current version (i386 will be out later today) by
1) doing a custom install without creating a swap space.
2) Then after install got to the System Advanced menu / Miscellaneous and set the option Use RAM Disks as well as the appropriate sizes for /tmp and /var
3) reboot your system

After this you end up with a one slice embedded system as writes go to memory and not to disk.

[stephenw10]

You might also want to edit the fstab to mount the filesystem '-noatime'. I'm not sure quite how much writing that entails.

Steve

[jschellevis]

Hi stephenw10,

Thanks for the tip.. just installed it on 2GB CF on i386 platform and tested.
Also looked closely at disk writes and it looks very well.. no substantial disk activity.

Still I will keep you tip in mind for the final solution.
Thanks again.

[stephenw10]

It's the standard mount option in pfSenses nano images. Also the 'sync' option seems relevant.
If you've got decent quality CF cards and have moved /tmp and /var to ram you shouldn't have a problem. Unfortunately my test box won't boot from anything else so actually installing is an issue. 

Steve

[franco]

We try to provide an install media for all types of installations. This creates a little twist on bsdinstaller that was never meant to support embedded installations. We will add a tweak for bsdinstaller quick installation to work better for embedded systems in the long run. There is a lot of work ahead of us to deal with the read-write locking more transparently in the future. We can only do so much at a time.

[franco]

So good to keep promises. We've had nano for a while now, latest images here: https://pkg.opnsense.org/releases/15.7.11/