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Faster, neater, smaller, etc? it's also handy to make statically linked systems/executables; sometime for very small applications, you mostly need the kernel,
by buserror 11y ago
Faster, neater, smaller, etc?
it's also handy to make statically linked systems/executables; sometime for very small applications, you mostly need the kernel, a small busybox and ONE executable; you can make really small 'distros' like that, especially when linked with LTO.
- tlrobinson 11y agoI've been wondering, is there a good package manager for busybox-based distros? It would be nice to have a tiny system by default but be able to easily install other packages when necessary, for debugging or whatever.
- buserror 11y agoWell, as a matter of fact, OpenWrt is probably the smallest you will get with a 'package manager'. It's really quite well made for that purpose. They have 'package install', they have 'full upgrade' and they also have an overlay filesystem to make changes to what is technically a read only system.... Personally, I prefer a tiny, very compact ROM style filesystem; if I need a package, I just rebuild it with it, and reboot. I'm the author of minifs: https://github.com/buserror/minifs https://github.com/buserror/minifs that is made to do just that. However, we're reaching the point where the kernel is so full of crud that it is in itself the bloatware, and far worse than the userland :-(
- hga 11y agoI'm rather fond of Alpine Linux (https://www.alpinelinux.org/ https://www.alpinelinux.org/), but echoing buserror, I doubt it's as small as OpenWrt.