Tuesday December 11, 2007
New OpenSolaris Project: SquashFS
The OpenSolaris storage community recently announced an other exciting project. The SquashFS project is getting started and looks quite interesting.
From the project page:
"Squashfs is a compressed read-only file system optimized for memory-constrained systems.
We plan to write a complete driver which would enable the kernel to boot from a Squashfs file system, thus enabling Live-CD/DVDs to use it.
It would also allow Solaris to access embedded devices using Squashfs, such as some Motorola phones."
Wouldn't that be cool to have OpenSolaris running on a cell phone? Actually I've heard that they guys that are working on Bellinix have something prototyped. Maybe they could comment?
Congratulations to Thomas on getting this project started and I wish you much success!
Posted by Jeff Cheeney [Open Source Storage] ( December 11, 2007 05:12 PM ) Permalink
Whilst getting squashFS happening might help get OpenSolaris onto a phone the elephant in the room is that OpenSolaris does not run on ARM.
Posted by Ché Kristo on December 11, 2007 at 06:01 PM MST #
"Whilst getting squashFS happening might help get OpenSolaris onto a phone the elephant in the room is that OpenSolaris does not run on ARM."
You're right, it doesn't yet. Give it time. Solaris hasn't yet reached critical development mass. Once he does, we're likely to see Solaris running on all kinds of exotic hardware.
Posted by UX-admin on December 12, 2007 at 03:00 AM MST #
Thanks for your encouraging message!
Actually, a friend of mine worked to determine how much the OpenSolaris Kernel could be stripped down, in order to be as light as possible, to be able to make it run on small appliances.
However, results weren't very encouraging right now. There's still a lot of work to do on this side to make Solaris scalable to cell phones! ;-)
Posted by Thomas Lecomte on December 13, 2007 at 06:18 AM MST #
I would be happy just to see a newer version of Solaris 10 working on a 128 Meg laptop again.
I am using an old version of Solaris 10 right now and I would like to be able to get some of the wireless features going of the more recent Solaris releases.
Posted by David Halko on January 03, 2008 at 10:47 AM MST #