Michael Dillon writes:

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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.

Not really, the BSDI installation procedure does it with one floppy. The BSDI bootstrap knows how to load a gzipped kernel image. I've made modified boot disks from their installation procedure. I've never turned on NFS though, and admittedly it's all packed in there tight enough that every time I want to do something else I'm deleting one thing to add another. An 8mb flash card for $300 would be very nice if it worked. Rob