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I'd like to see someone try re-inventing a minimalist userspace. Create an OS running on the Linux kernel without coreutils, binutils etc., and see how far you

• kapupetri 14y ago
  Something like Android?
• kryptiskt 14y ago
  It is possible to have just the kernel and just what you want to run hardwired as the init process, say some minimal web server. A slightly more sane solution is to have a minimal init process that can respawn your server if it crashes. As for filesystems, there needs to be something, I don't think it can work at all without a root file system, but a ram disk will do fine. The FHS directory structure isn't needed at all of course. I've seen some ridiculously stripped down embedded Linux systems. Most tend to have something like Busybox though, with a fairly conventional look, but some prefer to just use that while developing and rip it out in the deployed version.
• vidarh 14y ago
  I ported Linux to an embedded system that booted straight into ash (minimal shell). Other than ash, it only had custom applications. We didn't bother with a separate init app even - ash served that role sufficiently well. Linux has very minimal requirements of userspace - pretty much you need to have a process that will act as your init process that knows to wait to clean up any zombine processes now and again. The rest is pretty much up to how you want to organize things.