So I happen to have a pretty huge USB Thumb Drive (Sandisk 128GB), and I don't make much use of it. I was wondering if I could make partitions to it and run a portable operating system on it. Don't misunderstand me here, I know how to flash OSs on a USB. But I was wondering, if I could flash it on a separate partition. Suppose I want 100GB for storing normal files. And I make a partition in it for 100GB. The rest 14GB, I want to run a Linux distro on. Is it possible to just flash it on that 14GB partition? If yes, what are the challenges I'll be facing?
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I have successfully installed RedHat Linux and run them on harddrive using VMware simulation. Things work quite smooth if I put all the nodes VM on my physical machine.
For management purposes, I want to use USB devices to store ISO and plug one if more nodes are needed. I would like to run VMware on my physical machines.
Can I just build one virtual machine on one USB device? So I can plug one node if needed.
I mean, if I simulate machine A one USB 1 and another machine B on USB 2, can I build a network using my physical machine as server?
(1) If so, are there problems I should pay attention to?
(2) If not, are there any alternative solution for my management purpose?(I do not want to make VMs on partitions of my physical machine now) Can I use multiple mobile hard drives instead?
Actually I want to start up master-slaves Hadoop2.x deployments using virtual machines. Are there any good reference for this purpose?
I shall explain that am not too lazy to have a try on my idea, however, it is now rather expensive to do so if I do not even know something about the feasibility of this solution.
Thanks for your time.
I'm not an expert on VMWare, but I know that this is common on almost any virtualization system. You can install a system :
on a physical device (a hard disk, a hard disk partition)
or on a file
The physical device way allows normally better performances since you only use one driver between the OS and the device, while the file way offer greater simplicity to add one VM.
Now for your questions :
Can I just build one virtual machine on one USB device? Yes, you can always do it on a file, and depending on host OS directly on the physical device
... can I build a network using my physical machine as server? Yes, VMWare will allow the VM to communicate with each other and/or with the host and/or with external world depending on how you configure the network interfaces of your VMs.
If so, are there problems I should pay attention to?
USB devices are pluggable and unpluggable. If you unadvertantly unplug one while the OS is active bad things could happen. That's why I advised you to use files on the hard disk to host your VMs.
memory sticks (no concern for USB disks) support a limited number of writes and generally perform poorly on writes. Never put temp filesystem of swap there but use a memory filesystem for that usage, as is done for live filesystems on read-only CD or DVD
every VMs uses memory from the host system. That is often the first limitation for the number of simultaneous VMs on a personnal system
I'm running embedded Linux (Debian on ARM/X86_64). Since it is very much like a full OS, with some hardware differential and a different platform, you may consider it as a regular machine. So, this will be used in the robotics field where the computer will ALWAYS be hard reset by turning off power. It would disqualify me to use a UPS so I would need to make the system infallible.
I'm running some processor-intensive tasks, like OpenCV and OpenNI and OpenKinect. How do I use an uber-powerful filesystem, like ZFS to mirror the entire disk on the SSD for error correction? Does ZFS perform well in Linux? I'm still kinda a newbie in Linux so I don't understand it's internal workings.
My list of possible platforms are:
--Debian#RaspberryPi
--kUbuntu#ODROID-X2
--Ubuntu#PandaBoard
--Ubuntu#NUC-i3/5.
Also, how can I make sure the filesystem doesn't get damaged during reset? I need the computer to start in good time, A.K.A, <3 minutes for the competition.
I will probably be using a 32GB SSD, so I guess a 16GB partition mirrored 2x works or 12 # 3x. I only need to get an OpenCV install working because the code will be downloaded from a SAMBA NFS automatically!
Thanks for your help and good luck ;)!
ZFS is not suited for low memory systems. It do perform well on system with 4GB of RAM and more.
I would like to create a RAM disk programmatically using Node.js, no matter what the underlying OS is (OS X, Linux and Windows should be supported).
What is the best way to achieve this?
Of course I can run a command as a child process, but I would need to write this code individually for each OS. For obvious reasons I'd like to avoid this.
Is there a better approach (even a module that does it would be fine)?
In a low level and uncommon operation like this, there is no standartized way to generate a RAM disk, it is platform dependent and hence there is no functionality of this in NodeJS and there won't be likely, you have to write an extension. In Windows, it will call ramdisk.exe (not so familiar with it) and on Linux it is availalbe under /dev/shm , which you can resize by mount options later. So, the best way is to find the best external program for Windows versions, and in Linux just mount and use the /dev/shm like a normal folder.
More Info on /dev/shm
Is it possible to write coding that will allows one to store multiple OS (in their ISO format) into a CD/DVD and turn them into a Live CD/DVD for later use?
Yes. You would probably want to use Grub4DOS as your boot loader because it can boot operating systems from disk images, which, to my knowledge, other boot loaders don't do. So you could potentially load up a DVD-ROM with Grub4DOS and several live CD isos so that you could then boot multiple operating systems from that DVD-ROM.
I need to produce an embedded ARM design that has requirements to do many things that embedded Linux would do. However the design is cost sensitive and does not need huge amounts of horse power. Mostly will be talking to serial interfaces. Ideally I would like to use one of the low end ARMs. What is the lowest configuration of an ARM that you have successfully used embedded Linux on.
Edit:
The application needs a file system on some kind of flash device and the ability to run applications for processing the data. Some of the applications might be written by others than myself. I also need to ability to load new applications or update old apps using the serial ports to accept the apps.
When I have looked at other embedded OSes they seem to be more of a real time threading solution than having the ability to run applications. I am open to what ever will get the job done.
I think you need to weigh your cost options here.
ARM + linux is an option but you will be paying a very high operating overhead for such a simple (from your description) set of features. You can't just look at the cost of the ARM chip but must also consider external RAM which will very likely be required as well as flash to get enough space available to run the kernel + apps.
NOTE: you may be able to avoid the external requirements with a very minimal kernel and simple apps combined with a uC with large internal resources.
A second option is a much simpler microcontroller with a light weight OS. This will cut your hardware costs on the CPU and you can likely run something like this without external RAM or flash (dependent on application RAM and program space requirement)
third option: I don't actually see anything in your requirements that demands any OS at all be used. Basic file systems are very simple, for instance there are even FAT drivers out there for 8 bit PIC's. Interfacing to an SD card only requires a SPI port and minimal external circuitry.
The application bit could be simple or complex. I've built systems around PIC18 microcontollers that run a web server and allow program updates via a simple upload screen, it just stores the new program into an EEPROM or flash, reboots into a bootloader and copies the new program into internal program memory. You could likely design a way to do this without the reboot via a cooperative multitasking type of architecture. Any way you go the programmers writing the apps are going to need to have knowledge of the architecture and access to libraries / driver you write. Your best bet to simplify this is to provide as simple an API as possible and to try to automate the build process for them.
The third option will be the "cheapest" in terms of hardware as there will be very little overhead in the processing of your applications allowing you to get away with minimal processing power and memory. It likely will require some more programming/software architecting on your part but won't require nearly the research you will need to undertake to get linux up and running in addition to learning to write the needed device drivers under a linux paradigm.
As always you have to include the software development costs in the build cost of the device. If you plan to build 10,000+ of these your likely better off keeping hardware costs down and putting more man power into designing a software solution that allows that hardware to meet the design goals. If your building 10 of them, your better off spending an extra $15-20 on hardware if it can cut down on your software development costs. For example an ARM with MMU with full linux kernel support and available device drivers.
I kind of feel that your selecting the worst of both worlds at the moment, your paying extra to get a uC you can run linux on but by doing so your also selecting a part that will likely be the most complex to get linux up and running on, especially having not worked with linux on embedded platforms before.
I've had success even on ARM7TDMI, so I don't think you're going to have any trouble. If you have a low-requirements system, you could use any kind of lightweight real-time executive and have a lot better experience than you would getting Linux to work.
I've used a TS-7200 for about five years to run a web server and mail server, using Debian GNU Linux. It is 200 MHz and has 32 MB of RAM, and is quite adequate for these tasks. It has serial port built in. It's based on a ARM920T.
This would be overkill for your job; I mention it so you have another data point.
For several years I've been using a gumstix to do prototyping and testing and I've had good results with it. I don't know if the processor they are using (Intel PXA255 on my board) is considered low-cost, but the entire Verdex line seems pretty cheap to me for an adaptable device.
ucLinux is designed specifically for resource constrained targets, but perhaps more importantly for targets without an MMU.
However you have to have a good reason to use Linux on such a system rather than a small real-time executive. Out-of-the-box networking, readily available drivers and protocol stacks for complex hardware and support for existing POSIX legacy or open source code are a few perhaps. However if you don't need that, Linux is still large, and you may be squandering resources for no real benefit. In most cases you will still need off-chip SDRAM and Flash if you choose Linux of any flavour.
I would not regard serial I/O as 'complex hardware', so unless you are running a complex, but standard protocol, your brief description does not appear to warrant the use of Linux IMO
My DLINK DIR-320 router runs Linux inside.
And I know some handymen, flashing it with Optware and connecting USB-hub, HDDs, USB-flash, and much more.
It's low-cost ready for use "platform". (If you don't need mass production). But maybe more powerful than you need.
Additionally, it can be configured wirelessly via web-interface even through your pda :)