Re: Selection of roadmap for i386 platform End-of-Life (EOL)

[Chris Turner <c.turner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/26/13 12:49, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
>>
>>
>> There is also still the 'embedded servers' e.g. soekris where DF
>> is quite applicable as an OS
>
> Does anyone run DragonFly on a Soekris?
>
> Why?

http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/sys/config/SOEKRIS

I personally don't, but do have a few soekren which run openbsd
they are great firewall / network boxes, and when setup with flash+memory disks,
have no moving parts, etc. The above config was committed for a reason,
and mainly for firewalling, don't recall by whom. There is something
to be said for full control firewalls, and something more to be said
for having one OS to manage on your network, and this just covers the
firewall case.

Anyhow, this comment was not so much about 'soekris' in particular, but
for 'smallish' systems in general, which definitely still have their place
(maybe not in this project, but they do somewhere)

IIRC the big 'low memory discussion' of recent months was for like 32mb and
also with hammerfs as a fileserver which is pretty memory intensive
(and therefore pretty rediculous/fringe) vs a FFS install as would be
typical for a 'light / tiny system'

Yes this is getting into 'custom' territory, and I'm not stepping up
to maintainership, but also something to keep in mind for planning IMHO.

Just because Google Chrome says you need 20GB to do anything useful
doesn't mean it's actually true. I prefer awk and a CSV file to a bloated
javascript spreadsheet that needs 30 .js libraries, an internet connection,
and an admin/mining backend that I cant see and don't control to allow
advertisers and god-knows-who to mine my FoAF data for example[1,2].
And this works just about as well on a soekris (or a PDP-11 for that matter)
as a CoolGuyCoreTwoQuadI17. But I guess I'm not cool because I don't
have 'followers' on 'social media' </rant-and-speculative-overreaction>

[1] http://www.cray.com/Products/BigData/uRiKA.aspx
[2] REDACTED