Gentoo is so promiscuous
Yea, that's the Mac Mini booting Gentoo. As Pieter points out on his blog, it seems to be running fine. You may remember Pieter from an interview we did awhile ago, and recently he sort of tripped me up by passing a bit of news on...
Just a quick note to let you know we're going to be working on getting machines with an iPod Flash plugged in to boot an X-enabled Gentoo environment, right from the iPod. We'll probably demo this at LWE boston if devs over there have their iPod by then. We're also planning to support the Mac Mini (obviously).
Technically it's possible, if a little nutty (in a good way), but could end up being really cool. I know Pieter's group has been doing a lot of work on compacting everything they can, sometimes with extraordinarly success. And once you have the optimizations you'd need to have things running decently, something like iPod Mini, etc. would be pretty much cake.
Don't get too excited about some of this, in the sense that you aren't going to be plugging in an iPod Shuffle and working off your home while going from computer to computer. It would be very in line with loading stuff into memory and treading the flash card as basically read-only, ala Knoppix, etc. To my understanding, each block on a piece of flash can be erased and written to about 100,000 times before it's worthless (there's actually some neat logic in the controllers of these devices to try to stave this off), so you don't want to be using your iPod Shuffle for swap.
One thing I'm looking forward to with the iPod Shuffle are seeing some real benchmarks, and with them a more solid understanding of what drive it's using. You'd be surprised at how the performance between brands, and that different types run at wildly different speeds. I.E., you can be talking about a default transfer rate of 600 KB/sec (about a 4x CD drive) to 3.x MB/sec. I think. At least it used to be about that.
To be fair, much of this was/is about the quality of the controller interface and not the actual medium... and the default transfer rate stuff can get weird, as all flash media products are an order of magnitude faster at reading data than actually writing it... although that limitation may have gone away with newer variants.
Must. Not. Spend hours. Reading. Up. On newer flash memory.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 26, 2005, at 11:49 PM
Comments (3)
Posted by: Oliver at January 27, 2005 03:59 AM
Hmm. Remember the 'home on your iPod' info posted to apple.com a year or two ago, and have you seen the article on engadget about how to boot OS X off your iPod. The problem doing either of these things has always been that the iPod's drive isn't built for spinning continuously. So, I gets to thinking, surely this won't be an issue with flash. No, 1GB isn't enough to install OS X, but 4 or 5 is and flash iPods with those sizes can't be too far away.
Posted by: ssp at January 27, 2005 05:39 AM
The computer guys in our department built a Linux based firewall that runs off such flash sticks. It looks like quite a good idea as they probably don't have to worry about mechanical failures. In addition they offer an update service where the clients will get an updated flash stick and send back the old one or so. It just sounds like a neat idea that may look prettier when done with an iPod.
Interfaces and chipsets make a difference, too - but building something to boot off of is not a speed freak heavy load.
Pretty cool re: mini and gentoo.