Creating purpose-built TinyCoreLinux Images

Creating purpose-built TinyCoreLinux Images(fabianstumpf.de)

84 points by _cbdev 10 years ago | 32 comments

serguzest 10 years ago |

I wouldn't bother with this. There is an excellent project named Buildroot for the exact purpose. There is also Yocto but it generates bigger images in their recommended configuration but you can always tweak it.

homarp 10 years ago | |

A nice Yocto tutorial: http://free-electrons.com/doc/training/yocto/

A nice buildroot tutorial: http://free-electrons.com/doc/training/buildroot/

voltagex_ 10 years ago | |

Buildroot can be quite intimidating to the newcomer - I had to ask many questions on IRC to get my build tree down to something I could share [1]

[1]: https://github.com/voltagex/serial-vm-buildroot

eatonphil 10 years ago | |

Supermin[0] is another really cool tool that might be interesting. Though I still can't exactly tell if it's relevant.

[0] http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin

rwmj 10 years ago | | |

Supermin solves a narrow case: how to distribute an appliance [Linux-based OS disk image] as a very small download (typically 100K - 1MB). It works by observing that the end user already has the files they need as part of their host Linux OS (eg. /bin/bash, /lib/libc.so), and the distribution is just a skeleton of the disk image, which is "filled in" on the end user's machine by copying the host files in at the last second.

So it's not really applicable here, although I understand people use supermin to build chroots for Docker (as the author of supermin, I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that unless you understand the limitations).

What is actually needed here is libguestfs, which is a pure userspace tool for building disk images that doesn't require root access and is built for scripting/automation and security. We have a tool built on top of libguestfs called virt-builder which specifically churns out minimal Linux distros very quickly.

Sadly virt-builder can't build TinyCore Linux yet, although it probably should be extended to do that. It would be a lot simpler to use virt-builder, than to go through the tedious and dangerous steps outlined in the article.

http://libguestfs.org/

http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html

voltagex_ 10 years ago | | |

These kinds of tools are very relevant when creating Docker base images - not all of us can afford to download 1.6GB just for Ruby. See the official Ruby baseimage vs Alpine + ruby package for example

hoodoof 10 years ago | | |

Supermin seems quite old. Perhaps an idea that has passed?

mwcampbell 10 years ago |

As I get some pleasure out of writing scripts to build finely tuned minimal images like this, I found the article interesting. However, I think manipulating a qcow2 image directly via nbd is over-complicating it. I think it would be better to create a sparse file, mount that via a loopback device, work with that, and then convert it to a qcow2 image (or vmdk or whatever) at the end.

jensmittag 10 years ago |

Thank you guys for all the links to related projects. I need to create embedded Linux image for a project in the near future, so your links are quite handy.

diminish 10 years ago |

Does anyone have an idea how a minimal base Linux image can run inside a browser? Like can we create a small virtual Linux server right inside a browser?

mwcampbell 10 years ago | |

http://jslinux.org/

It's a clever hack, but I don't know of any practical application. Did you have one in mind? Or is it just for the hack value?

homarp 10 years ago | | |

Depending what you want to do, there is also the OR1K Emulator running Linux - http://jor1k.com and a generic x86 emulator - v86 - https://github.com/copy/v86

you can check a small benchmark here: https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Benchmark-with-other-e...

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498305

diminish 10 years ago | | |

a test / development environment inside the browser where a server is emulated for testing purposes too, accompanied with a code editor.

I d like to describe the vm configuration similar to chef or ansible in js and run some dev/test code.

s-macke 10 years ago | |

You need just the Linux kernel and Busybox in order to run Linux with a working shell. 2-4 MB all together I would say. My first Internet router ran a Linux from a 1.44MB disk 15 years ago.

vidarh 10 years ago | | |

You're in the right ballpark. I ported a network monitoring app to Linux and helped bring Linux up on a custom board a long time ago, and that device had 4MB for the kernel, shell/utilities and the application itself. It fit nicely.

ilurk 10 years ago |

Can anyone tell what are the differences between a TinyCoreLinux image and a Rumpkernel, and the practical implications of those differences?

justincormack 10 years ago | |

TinyCoreLinux is just a small Linux distro. A rump kernel is a unikernel reusing netbsd code, running in a single address space.

thoughtexpt 10 years ago |

Is the Linux kernel compatible with multiboot specification yet?

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot....

stonogo 10 years ago | |

The grub multiboot specification is short-sighted, x86 specific, and generally useless.

voltagex_ 10 years ago | | |

Not useless, it's a useful thing to have when you're trying to learn how to write Hello World as an OS - http://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones

Are there any bootloader specs that are standard across architectures? UEFI comes to mind, and I'm sure you could boot an x86 board via u-boot.