4 ms·

I'm pretty sure you can find MIPS Linux images with Busybox et. all. that weigh less than that. A lot of routers run Linux on 2M eproms including user space.

• david-given 11y ago
  I have a port of Alan Cox's Fuzix for the MSP430 where the entire bootable ROM image is 27kB. (That's actually quite big for a tiny-computer OS, although it's the smallest Unix I know of.)
  • DiabloD3 11y ago
    For those who don't know who Alan Cox is, he was the Linux 2.2 branch maintainer, is still heavily involved in Linux, and also does lots of other neat shit.
  • cbsmith 11y ago
    I seem to recall the QNX kernel is pretty slim as well.
    • pjc50 11y ago
      I used to have a 1.44Mb floppy that booted QNX to a desktop environment. Of course, that's not so unusual historically: both Amiga and GEM had single-floppy desktop enviroments (or did the Amiga require two to get to Workbench?)
    • david-given 11y ago
      That's just the microkernel, though --- it didn't contain any functionality other than sending messages (and a few other things, microkernels very). Fuzix' 27kB contains the scheduler, drivers, tty, file system and Posix subsystem!
      • cbsmith 11y ago
        Fuzix definitely was end to end. On the other hand, the QNX kernel is a more capable foundation to build on.
• pantalaimon 11y ago
  EmCraft shows a 594kB linux image for Cortex M4 http://www.emcraft.com/stm32f429discovery/what-is-minimal-footprint http://www.emcraft.com/stm32f429discovery/what-is-minimal-fo...
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• wtallis 11y ago
  You won't find anything remotely recent squeezing into a mere 2MB. You can't really get Linux that slim anymore without cutting out major things like the network stack. 4MB is still (just barely) enough ROM for a real router, if you're judicious about what features to include, and don't mind the lack of a browser-based configuration interface.