I moved this to port-embed where it's more appropriate. But out of scope?
Depends upon what port-mips is supposed to encompass. If someone wants to
know about porting a bootloader to specifically bring up BSD it seems quite
in scope. True, embedding free OS's is a very hot topic right now and for
the foreseeable future. And the lack of texts on the subject makes lists
like these ever more important, and relevant. The tech-embed list may have
to eventually expand.

Thank you Tohru-san for the Flash disk reference. It might do the trick...

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: nisimura@itc.aist-nara.ac.jp [mailto:nisimura@itc.aist-nara.ac.jp]
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 12:54 AM
To: port-mips@NetBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Embedding NetBSD


> Could someone direct me to a FAQ or other info regarding embedding NetBSD
> into "deeply" embedded systems. I need to have info on bootloaders ( I
need
> to add system diagnostics and some boot terminal functions ), Flash file
> system management (for onboard Flash, not Compact Flash cards).

It's out of NetBSD scope, in theory.

"The art of embedding" is too hot topic that it has not been mature
enough to make text books for the subject.  The issue is, such the
systems are subject specific by nature, and it's not necessarily true
that one instance of the approach and implementation is useful, or even
valid, to others.  So, no siliver bullet.  Let's say, bootloader.
Some bright engineers can build feature-rich, useful, and yet
re-targettable ROM monitor, but it's very likely "over engineered" for
specific development project with given time-frame. 

For flash memory, I can provide a pointer to OpenBSD/wgrisc.  It
implements "flash memory disk" on conventional flash chip.  As I'm
unable to try the code myself, I can not say the usefulness or the
technical feasiblity.

Tohru Nishimura