Hi all,

I am trying to see if I can get my CATS board (arm32) to boot entirely off
of flash, without needing a disk or network boot. My first thought was that
I should (a) configure a minimalist kernel that understands only how to load
a ramdisk (for my target application, memory footprint is crucial) and (b)
construct a small ramdisk, then burn both into flash. However, before I
start I'd like to know if anyone else has tried to do something similar, and
what experiences they had.

In particular, information/tips on configuring a NetBSD kernel for minimum
memory usage and for a ramdisk boot (assuming the ramdisk just "appears" at
a certain memory address) would be great. I've been poking around kernel
options and I see support for mfs and ramdisk pseudo-devices, but I'm a bit
unclear as to whether the two are separate entities, or how to actually use
them via boot flags passed to the kernel.

Actually, has anyone gotten a NetBSD kernel < 500K uncompressed without
disabling networking support? I've been trying that all afternoon, and my
-current source tree doesn't seem to like me. :-)

Thanks in advance.

---
Edwin Foo
Compaq Computer Corp. - Cambridge Research Lab 
MIT EECS BS '98, M. Eng. '99