In a comment on my previous post, Zod asked:
We do you try to strip down your fedora and not just build a minimal linux distribution with tools like t2?
There’s nothing wrong at all with using one of the many minimal linux kits around. Using busybox and a replacement libc it’s possible to squeeze Linux down to a floppy disk, or into the 4 MB of flash on a router. However there are also reasons to use a mainstream distribution such as Fedora (or Debian) as a basis.
- We can write code against glibc, using ordinary compilers and tools.
- We can reuse any existing package. They don’t need to be rebuilt or compiled in a special way.
- We can reuse existing packaging tools, like rpm and yum.
- We get the benefit of all the testing, bug reports and fixes from the distribution. In particular, we won’t get our own “special” class of bugs appearing. If we see a bug, it’s likely the bug would also happen in Fedora, and we can report it back to the Fedora maintainer.
- Any minimization benefits we make (both size and boot speed) can be pushed back into Fedora.
I’m aiming for a small, but not super-minimal, image, in the region of 16-48 MB, containing an NFS server, LVM tools, and some tools of my own.
1 Comment
November 9, 2009 at 7:28 pm
[...] to hit [F12] on the imaginary keyboard. A simple patch to bochs BIOS fixes that … This patch benefits everyone using Fedora and virtualization, since all boot times will be reduced by 3 [...]