Linux turns up in the darnedest places. Such as . . . vibration health monitors. These embedded Linux systems alert engineers about errant vibrations in their turbine generators, main boiler feed pumps, and nuclear power plants. This detailed technical whitepaper is not specific to vibration health monitors, but covers in a rather specific way one approach to getting Linux running on a DiskOnChip. The whitepaper was written by Don Davies, who has learned a thing or two about embedded Linux through his work on the PROTOR distributed vibration monitoring system.

The whitepaper describes the setup and configuration of a development system for a suitable single board computer which supports the DiskOnChip solid-state disk device from M-Systems. It also shows how to access the DiskOnChip from within a Linux environment and how to make the system bootable from DiskOnChip so that no hard disk is required. In order to run Linux from a DiskOnChip device some details are provided on the essential files needed from a standard Red Hat Linux distribution, together with some useful utilities which allow a fully functional, small-footprint Linux system to be stored and run from a 32MB DiskOnChip.

Read the whitepaper

 
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