# FreeBSD & NLSU



## darkskye (Apr 30, 2009)

I've been reading Warner's blog posts about FreeBSD and the NSLU, but have struck a dead end.

Rather than netbooting I'd prefer to be able to boot from the internal flash and USB.

Warner's follow-up post about slimming the kernel down helped somewhat, and I now have a kernel, with USB support (and very little else!) along with gzboot (borrowed from NetBSD-evbarm) which I'm planning to flash my NSLU with.

Rather than trimming down the kernel so drastically, I had a thought, so I pose this question to the more experienced hackers out there...

Would it be possible to build a kernel which will then use a ramdisk image to kldload other modules out of a md in the NSLU's other bit of flash ram (in much the same way that Linux does)? Or should I be looking more at building a customized md to use as a root device during boot, which then mounts the root filesystem from the usb, in much the same way the installer does but with some heavy duty init tweaks?

Thanks,
A.


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