Re: Questions about filesystem choice

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 9:01 PM, DL <devinlasalle%hotmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> Hello all -
>
> I am aiming (in my very first attempt to run NetBSD) to install NetBSD to run 
> a
> VERY limited use database for access to a small amount of data and files (less
> than 1000MB).  If I can get the 5.1 RC2 sysinst to do it (crossing my 
> fingers) I
> am going to attempt to install / (including the kernel) onto a 256MB flash 
> disk
> (wd0) and everything else that will be written frequently (swap, /home, /var,
> /usr) to a SCSI disk (sd0).
>
> Note: for whatever it may be worth I THINK I have to run / from wd0 because 
> the
> sparc64 machine I'm using will need the the modules to run the SCSI controller
> before it can use whatever is on the SCSI disk.
>
> My question at the moment: sysinst presents a lot of choices for filesystems 
> to
> install the minimal base and etc sets and I am not finding much in the way of
> comparisons of these filesystems available for NetBSD.  Any thoughts on what
> filesystem(s) (i.e. FFSv1, FFSv2, etc) might be both reliable for running / 
> and
> perhaps advantageous for extending the life of a flash disk which has some
> limited number of write cycles before it dies?
>

sysinstall doesn't have a great concept of moving files around so you
might need to end up doing some manual post-install cpio.

I wrote the following to reduce disk access if you're not going to try
and go full read-only:
http://www.mspo.com/netbsdreadmostly.html