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I currently want to put together a cut-down, minimal userspace rootfs that boots a VNC viewer for some old laptops. Essentially busybox+wpa_supplicant+Xorg (for

by i336_ 10y ago

I currently want to put together a cut-down, minimal userspace rootfs that boots a VNC viewer for some old laptops. Essentially busybox+wpa_supplicant+Xorg (for synaptics touchpad support >.>)+tigervnc, and a bunch of hand-written init scripts to boot everything. I could go hunting and take my existing system apart until I have a bunch of binaries and libraries that coexist and don't cause nuclear explosions, but I can't help but think that rebuilding all the bits I need from scratch might get me a smaller initramfs image. (At the very least I could compile out all the features I don't need.) My question is: how best could I build everything (on Arch Linux) in an isolated way, such that gcc/clang figures out that I want everything to link together, without going full crazy and building gcc inside a chroot (like LFS does), etc etc? I figure I want lots of PREFIX and manual specification of libraries to ./configure, but is there anything else I should take into account? I also vaguely recall a single-floppy Linux distro from years back that came with a random shell or Perl script that would do code analysis for you and strip out never-used function calls in libraries so that the resulting library build was smaller. Is anyone aware of anything like that that's a proper application?

wtf_is_up 10y ago
Check out Yocto Project. I've used it to build a minimal distro for Gumstix boards, but it also supports generic x86/amd64 targets as well. It's built on top of bitbake and you essentially enable recipes for packages you want to have installed. https://www.yoctoproject.org/downloads/bsps https://www.yoctoproject.org/downloads/bsps
- i336_ 10y ago
  Hmm. Interesting, thanks.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  What's the difference between Yocto and Buildroot?
gvb 10y ago
Also check out Buildroot: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/ It uses Kconfig to give pretty fine grained selection of what packages are included in your file system and supports (painless!?) cross compilation by building the proper compiler toolchain or using a preexisting toolchain. Once you are happy with your configuration, you can save it e.g. as a "default config" and regenerate it repeatably, reliably, and effortlessly. It takes a while to do a full build, but caching speeds up rebuilds (you have to be careful to "rm" cached parts that you really do want to rebuild). make distclean && make <defaultconfig> && make I've been really impressed. I'm currently building for an embedded target on a AMD64 linux creating a x86 ISO that I boot on a VM for development when I don't have real hardware available and then building for our embedded ARM hardware when I get access to our prototype.
- i336_ 10y ago
  Maybe I'll have to give it a look. I get the impression it wants to add a bit of its own special sauce into things. I was just thinking along the lines of building the libraries and binaries together and adding an init script or two, without anything else. (Also, what's the prototype? That sounds interesting.)

by i336_ 10y ago

wtf_is_up 10y ago

Check out Yocto Project. I've used it to build a minimal distro for Gumstix boards, but it also supports generic x86/amd64 targets as well. It's built on top of bitbake and you essentially enable recipes for packages you want to have installed. https://www.yoctoproject.org/downloads/bsps https://www.yoctoproject.org/downloads/bsps

i336_ 10y ago
Hmm. Interesting, thanks.
voltagex_ 10y ago
What's the difference between Yocto and Buildroot?

gvb 10y ago

Also check out Buildroot: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/ It uses Kconfig to give pretty fine grained selection of what packages are included in your file system and supports (painless!?) cross compilation by building the proper compiler toolchain or using a preexisting toolchain. Once you are happy with your configuration, you can save it e.g. as a "default config" and regenerate it repeatably, reliably, and effortlessly. It takes a while to do a full build, but caching speeds up rebuilds (you have to be careful to "rm" cached parts that you really do want to rebuild). make distclean && make <defaultconfig> && make I've been really impressed. I'm currently building for an embedded target on a AMD64 linux creating a x86 ISO that I boot on a VM for development when I don't have real hardware available and then building for our embedded ARM hardware when I get access to our prototype.

i336_ 10y ago
Maybe I'll have to give it a look. I get the impression it wants to add a bit of its own special sauce into things. I was just thinking along the lines of building the libraries and binaries together and adding an init script or two, without anything else. (Also, what's the prototype? That sounds interesting.)