The board currently does boot from the 8MB flash into RedBoot firmware 
where the netbsd kernel could reside.  It could be possible to have a 
kernel and ramdisk, but putting a real read/write filesystem there gets 
tricky because of the nature of flash.  Linux has what it calls "MTD" 
drivers (memory technology device) and a set of filesystems that are very 
tightly coupled to each variation of flash chips which seems a bit 
overkill.  It seems what we need to implement in a driver is the same sort 
of hardware built-in controller logic present on USB thumb drives and CF 
cards which exposes the flash chip as block devices.  I haven't given a 
lot of thought to it yet though, so I could be wrong.

//Jesse Off

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Werner Backes wrote:

> Jesse Off wrote:
>> and I'd like to do something useful with the 8Mb onboard NOR flash chip 
>> though I'm not sure how or what yet. 
>
> How about booting from it?  8MB should be enough for a small kernel and
> some applications and this would keep USB/CompactFlash free for other
> purposes.
>
> Werner
>
>