Michael Dillon writes:
You can also try building a machine with a boot device like the 2.88 megabyte floppies. Using the same techniques FreeBSD uses for their boot disks, you can decompress the boot floppy into a large RAMDISK and run that way. Or simply use a ZIP drive for the boot device but run from RAM as before. It's not as good as 100% solid state but it comes pretty close.
This isn't clear to me. Why do you assume a ZIP is likely to be more reliable that a hard disk? ZIPs haven't been around long enough to be sure of this, and HDs are pretty reliable these days. Of course I'm not saying that I *Want* to use an HD in this situation; flash is clearly a big win. But I don't see how using a floppy or ZIP improves wins. FWIW, I suspect that building a 1.4MB fs that can boot and then nfs-mount (or ftp to a memory fs) needed binaries would be not a lot harder for FreeBSD or BSDi than it was for NetBSD. /a