Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to give OpenBSD a try outside of VM testing. Does it have something like FreeBSD's NanoBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/...) yet? The seamless update-image-and-switch is a killer feature for my embedded use.

View on HN

The OpenBSD equivalent to NanoBSD is flashrd:

http://www.nmedia.net/flashrd/

It's not officially supported, however, and only recommended for systems that are likely to suffer power outages and for which running fsck would be problematic. I've used it a little on embedded systems and so far it's worked fine.

Even after reading that, I still don't understand what "nanobsd" is supposed to be for. All of the big 3 BSDs have used crunchgen plus kernels with embedded filesystems to create small, single file systems for over a decade. That's how the installation images are made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com