HN Reader

I've been working on a micro Linux distro for a couple of months now. User mode is just a single static binary (and a few files to support confidential microVM containers). The initramfs is such an interesting feature, the kernel knows how to unpack cpio archives and just magically drops you into a tmpfs and executes /init. You can have multiple concatenated cpio archives, and each can be compressed, and they all just overlay in sequence. There's an elegance to the design. I also had to write some code to unpack them and learned more than I wanted to.

I have a similar little project https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/azathos

I have my own toy init, shell and other utilities. The GNU coreutils are included for debugging.

My current focus is on drawing windows onto the framebuffer.

More recently, qemu supports uftrace on the more popular architectures. That’s how you answer the pro’s question, “but how do I debug this?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45533804

This is pretty neat. I remember making floppy-based "distributions" back in '98 to do utility tasks (imaging Windows PCs over UDP broadcast being one I spent a long time on). So many memories of "make bzimage", hanging init scripts, reboots. So many reboots.

Charmingly, the "modern" process doesn't seem wholly dissimilar. I would echo the comments of one of the sibling comments here: Targeting this to RPi would be fun and educational. Maybe I'll give it a try.

This entire, beautiful blog post scales wrong on my phone because of this one line of code near the bottom doesn't get wrapped or get its own overflow box: -device virtio-net-device,netdev=usernet -netdev user,id=usernet,hostfwd=tcp::10000-:22

I wonder what the level of difficulty getting this to run as a cloud image (e.g. on Vultr or Digitalocean) would be. Or getting it to boot a GUI and run firefox.

A version of this that targeted RPi would be neat!

I wonder why this instead of using Gentoo to explore Linux.

Thanks a lot for this awesome informative post, I genuinely learned a ton from it!

great for learning, to get one done fast, buildroot is a good candidate

Obligatory reference

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org

micro-distro?? just need one that installs easily on any 10year old hardware and can replace Windows for the most part.

this is kinda cool. Does that mean you can use u-root to embed as a UEFI image? or to boot a u-root image over PXE netboot?

Ilove