Small FreeBSD Home Page

This page contains information on developing FreeBSD to work in various small and unusual places, such as single floppy, vnode (vn(4)) partitions or embedded controllers.

With flexibility that FreeBSD gives, and full source code available, one can build a small installation performing various tasks, including (but not limited to):

• diskless workstation
• portable dial-up access solution
• custom demo-disk
• embedded controller (booted from flash or EEPROM)
• replacement for commercial router, communication server, firewall...
• diskless home-automation system
• and many others....

There is also mailing list freebsd-small@freebsd.org discussing such issues.

Here you can find information on specific projects, and some other links related to this:

• PicoBSD: fitting FreeBSD on a single floppy.
• Unified Configuration Interface Project - attempt to unify all configuration tasks and parameters of a unix system.
• A Practical Guide to Building Embedded FreeBSD System. (not yet available)
• TinyWare - small versions of various system utilities and servers
• Tips & Tricks for small setups.
• Other ideas and random thoughts on unusual FreeBSD setups.

Other links of interest (in no particular order):

• www.embedded.com contains a wealth of information on embedded setups, standards, parts and vendors.
• eg3.com maintains an extensive list of SBC vendors, together with related equipment.
• PC/104 Online catalogue - you can easily find here the part you're seeking for your embedded system.
• Forth - a language ideally suited for small applications, tiny and flexible. New FreeBSD bootloader contains a Forth implementation called FICL - you can try the floppy with the bootloader, if you want to play with it, and see how it looks like. BTW, this is a floppy image - you have to use something like rawrite to prepare the floppy. Or, alternatively, thanks to Neal Bridges who provided a self-extracting DOS .exe, you can use that if you want.
• Advantech produces various single-board computers and parts for embedded systems.
• SanDisk produces various flash memories and flash disks.
• M-Systems also produces them. Now available is the driver for their tiny flash memory called DiskOnChip. You can download the driver for FreeBSD 3.0 and newer from Poul-Henning Kamp's site.
• GNAT Box is a commercial product, which is very similar to PicoBSD's "router" floppy - though admittedly more featureful and user-friendly... BUT this is not our last word yet! :-)
• Fast Address Look-Up for Internet Routers (paper and BSD implementation). (local copy)
• ALTQ - Alternate queueing for FreeBSD.
• Zebra - free (GPL) alternative to GateD. Looks promising!
• Multi-Threaded Routing Toolkit

Wed Jan 6 04:01:37 PST 1999
Any comments? abial@freebsd.org