Quoting David Young (dyoung@pobox.com):
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 11:04:14PM -0500, Jan Schaumann wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > Roberto (roberto at redix dot it) has kindly made available his ``NetBSD
> > on Compact Flash'' documentation to me, and I put it online at
> > http://www.netbsd.org/~jschauma/netbsd-solidstate.html and
> > http://www.netbsd.org/~jschauma/netbsd-solidstate.pdf.
> > 
> > If somebody would like to look over it and suggest a good place where to
> > include it in our website, I'd appreciate it.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> 
> Incidentally, I use the attached rc script to mount memory filesystems and
> copy their contents from disk so that I can run NetBSD off of a CD-ROM
> or a read-only CompactFlash. It should be pretty easy (almost trivial)
> to use it for making "Live" CD-ROMs.
> 
> Should I check the script in?


There's a lot to be said to not putting whole FILE systems
into an MFS, but just parts of it.


I have an /MFS/
which is populated on boot from /MFS.PROTO/  (I use rsync, but pax would do)

sym links from (say) /var/tmp -> /MFS/var.tmp/
Same for /var/run,
Several files in /var/db/
/etc/resolv.conf -> /MFS/etc/resolv.conf

and so forth.


Been doing this on a soekris for a couple years on a couple BSDs
on Compact Flashs (devfs is nice).

Mounting /var in memory is wrong and wasteful.  Also bad on a
machine with 32MB of RAM and no swap.

It got me into the habit of making / readonly on boxes doing
mail relay and DNS and the like.  Nice that a power failure
pretty much risks NOTHING - most disks aren't RW, dns is secondary
and mail data is pretty transient.