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Comment by J_Darnley | Hacker News Reader

How little is little? Can I put it on the "original" linux router, the Linksys WRT54GL with 16MiB RAM and 4 MiB flash?

I believe it's impossible to squeeze relatively recent (9 or 10) FreeBSD versions down to that size. The linked git repo makes mention of needing at least 8MB for some builds. And you don't get IPv6 at that size.

Yup. OpenWRT uses (patched!) Linux, but with a much smaller set of libraries/utilities to fit in small storage footprints. I'm using ye normal FreeBSD libc, libcrypto, etc - things are pretty big.

It could be fun to take something like the BSD kernel and an alternative BSD licenced userland to make a much smaller footprint device, but I don't have the energy to /also/ do that.

If someone would like to do that then please do step up and do it! I wouldn't even mind if the FreeBSD wifi stack and Atheros MIPS support was ported back to NetBSD and NetBSD was used for this purpose.

Can you build a BSD on a case-insensitive file system? I wanted to look at modifying openwrt to fit on my routers but I was shocked to discover that linux needs a case-sensitve file system to build.

Anyway, it was a good read, thanks.

nope, it only builds inside freebsd for now. that's a bit of a sore point which I'd like to fix, but .. you know, ENOTIME.

NetBSD has some support of some kind for some of the Atheros chipsets. I understand even less about MIPS in NetBSD than I do in FreeBSD; but I'm very interested and financially motivated.

I'll have to get on freebsd-mips and start getting annoying with my simpleton questions :)

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