On Monday 26 May 2003 10:25 am, James Ogley wrote:
I would like to have your thoughts on the Scalability of SuSE Linux. I heard from a collegue that they managed to scale SuSE down to 30Megabytes, and that was a good achievement....
What they meant I suspect was that they installed it on a system with 30 (or more likely 32) megabytes of RAM - which is doable in spite of what the box may tell you...
Now, I am wondering if I could use SuSE in an embedded application, and go down to 2-3Megabytes in kernel size, pretty much like a Montavista kernel? My DSL modem- Speedstream 5260 has built in telnet and such. Its actually a firmeware crippled 5660 which has full Router/firewall capabilities. Out of curiosity i telnetted in and found a secret shell.
And to my surprise they are running a stripped unix/linux kernel! Some of the routing and netwrok commands are completely similar too. There is even a way to run GDB on it. I think it has about 4MB of ram. HMmm go figure. Its really fun to play with.... People have posted all sorts of things about hacking these "crippled" boxes and upgrading them to 5660 firewall/router functionality even though thats not what they were put out of the factory for. I even found instructions on how to solder a serial port into it in case you REALLY break it, you can telnet in via serial and fix it. All sorts of neat devices are actually running kernels with processors/ram/flash roms these days. I thought my DSL modem was a simple ATM bridge, but lo and behold it was smarter than i THOUGHT! Kind of scary to see what kinda of software they are actually putting in devices I thought were actually quite simple. On that thought I tried to telnet to my toaster with no luck. I think i have an earlier model... The Microwave does have an IP though....im portscanning it as we speak to see what services ITS running. No luck w/ telnet. ---------------------- Eric Bambach Eric@CISU.net ----------------------