CF to boot Linux

[Eric Johnson]

On Jan 11, 2008 12:17 PM, James Sissel <jimsissel at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I was thinking more of speed.  They've got to be faster than a hard drive.
> I've got this cute little adaptor that takes one of the SD cards and
> converts it into and IDE connection.  But the flash memory has a limit on
> how many times it can be erased before they are damaged.  It's quite high
> but I can see /tmp or /var hitting that limit.  I was thinking of putting
> those partitions on an actual hard drive.  The little card can be "locked"
> so no information can be written (it's a jumper).  So once you install Linux
> it would 1) boot quickly and 2) couldn't be changed unless you had physical
> access to the box.

You can use tmpfs for /tmp, and I suppose /var if you don't care about
saving logs from one boot to the next. You could probably even use
tmpfs and then save any files to some other location at shutdown and
read them in at boot. You'd need plenty of RAM, of course.

Make sure you use a good quality CF, too. In our experience at work,
SanDisk is good but Kingston drives will fail unless you leave around
10% of it unformatted.

I'd mount your root partition read-only if at all possible. Definitely
use noatime, too.

-- 

Eric Johnson

"Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure: where your treasure,
there your heart; where your heart, there your happiness."
Saint Augustine