On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> I run SL5 on 6 machines, and am considering building a low power
> browsing/email machine running SL5.  It will probably use an Atom
> mini-ITX board and a 30GB solid state drive - no moving parts, and
> using less than 40 watts.  I will do the usual /tmp in ramdisk
> and "noatime" in /etc/fstab, among other flash-friendly tweaks.
>
> Although the boot partition will be ext2/3 , I am considering
> making the main partition with the JFFS file system - the
> Journalling Flash File System.  That is not built into the
> SL5 kernel ... it is a module instead.  I'm wondering if the
> system will be able to find the JFFS module if /etc and /lib
> and /bin are stored as JFFS.   Probably not.  Does anyone know?
>
> I can compile my own kernel, of course, but I lose the advantage
> of automated updates.  I can also build the main partition with
> ext2/3, and move the frequently varying stuff like /var and
> /home into separate JFFS partitions.  I would rather use JFFS
> for as much as I can, though.  Updates could be extremely slow
> if too much of the system is ext2/3 .
>
> Ideas?

As the /boot will be ext2/3 then you probably just need to ensure that the 
jffs modules are included in the base set of modules which get built into 
the initrd when that gets built after a kernel install.

The mkinird script tries to guess which modules are needed to be able to 
mount the root (etc) fs - e.g. loading scsi drivers etc, so it ought to be 
able to make it work though you might need to tweak modprobe.conf (or 
something else) to ensure that it gets included).

  -- Jon