David Young dyoung%pobox.com@localhost said;
Let me suggest a few embedded projects that I believe are less risky and
more widely applicable.
* develop a driver for the NAND Flash storage on the RouterBOARD
1xx series, www.RouterBOARD.com. Demo writing a bootable
NetBSD image to the Flash. Demo running NetBSD from the flash
(read-only).
(RouterBOARD is an open-architecture board with MiniPCI slots
for wireless cards, et cetera. The cheapest boards in the
1xx series have no CompactFlash slot.)
I've ported NetBSD to Mesa Electronics 4C81 PC104plus SBC. The storage is 32MB/64MB bare NAND which holds BSDFFS. Bad blocks are forwarded by a preconfigured badblock list. No MTD included. Bootloader knows and handles /netbsd. The NAND block device driver allows writes. It'd be likely to get highly criticized but the decision was made weighing "the rootfs is seldom written beyond configuration mods by administrators." Software ECC is always calc'ed and verified, block write is counted and recorded inside NAND spare fields. Toru Nishimura/ALKYL Technology