closedbsd

any opinions on this
http://www.closedbsd.org

Any OS that claimed to work well on floppy disk is just lame. The difference is floppy disk vs. hard disk.

1) Floppy disk has no too slow of I/O
2) Hard disk is damn cheap these days
3) You still need a CPU, RAMs, network cards and other essential hardware

First, I agree that an OS on a floppy cannot compare with what you can put on a hard drive. But, the question about I/O speed shouldn't really matter, because these bootable floppy distributions don't actually use the floppy disk as a filesystem. They just have a compressed system image, which uncompresses to a RAM disk. I haven't seen an OS use a floppy as it's filesystem since the days of DOS 3.

What you sacrifice, though, is fast reboots, and system storage. For example, if you want to do logging, you are going to need something to write to besides a floppy or RAMdisk.

I don't think the floppy disk thing is so you can save money on hardware. The perceived benefit is that if you run in this mode, there is no disk where a cracker can save exploits, so if you reboot, your system is clean again. Of course anyone who takes the time with *BSD knows that you can similarly protect a filesystem on a hard disk, if you take the time.