Michael Smith wrote:

>Here is a somewhat related question.
>
>I have a USB memory storage device with a built in MP3 player. These
>devices are commonly bought from swap meets here in Australia for 60-100
>AUD depending on capacity. It has a menu option to upgrade firmware from
>a file, so theoretically the firmware could be replaced by something
>else.
>
>Could NetBSD be installed to actually run on a device like this? I
>already have one opinion suggesting that the answer is no:
>

In the case of a device like the Apple iPod, while it has an ARM 
processor core(or at least it did...),
the version of processor is an MMU-less implementation, and so, could 
not run BSD. There are MMU-less
varients of Linux, but I'm not aware of any for NetBSD... there was a 
very ancient implementation
of Unix which ran 'MMU-less' on x86 processors, circa 1984/5... using 
the illconceived 'segment'
registers to allow programs to run somewhat 'position independently'...

Then there's the issue of memory on such a device...

John Clark