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Written by blinry on 2025-01-21 at 16:20

Last week, I built a tiny #Linux system from scratch! 🐧🔧

It consists of the bare minimum required to boot into a shell on real hardware. I learned a ton about what terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean!

Let me show you how I did it, step by step:

https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/

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Descendants

Written by hexaheximal on 2025-01-21 at 16:27

@blinry this is quite an interesting approach!

one thing I would suggest is using busybox's init system - it lets you get to a somewhat usable system with a tty login prompt using just a few files (/etc/inittab and some files in /etc/init.d)

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Written by blinry on 2025-01-21 at 16:29

@hexaheximal Oh, that seems very useful!

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Written by allison on 2025-01-21 at 16:28

@blinry this is so cool! thank you for sharing your notes!

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Written by blinry on 2025-01-21 at 16:34

@aparrish Glad you enjoyed it! :)

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Written by Ariel on 2025-01-21 at 16:32

@blinry thank you Blinry, very cool.

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Written by BenBE on 2025-01-21 at 16:37

@blinry TinyLinux for a TinyHouse … ;-)

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Written by yetzt on 2025-01-21 at 16:59

@blinry blinrux.

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Written by Shell :fedora: on 2025-01-21 at 17:17

@blinry I mean, in my opinion, we should just use toasters. Laptops are bloat! /s

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Written by Shakil Akhtar 🇸🇦 🇵🇸 on 2025-01-21 at 18:16

@blinry Very nice work!! Thanks for taking the time to share you experience with us.

👍 👍 👍

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Written by sadmin on 2025-01-21 at 18:22

@blinry thanks, I didn't think it would be relatively easy

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Written by skalabyrinth on 2025-01-21 at 18:39

@blinry Doing such a thing always was my dream!

(but ... well ... I have too little ressources)

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Written by draeath on 2025-01-21 at 19:11

@blinry if you ever want to peek further down the rabbit hole:

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Written by Momo on 2025-01-21 at 19:47

@blinry

Oh, now I have a flashback to back in the days when I was running Gentoo and wrote my own initrd to do some disk encryption because back in the days there was no dracut that just makes you one... Good job getting this running. You probably figured out yet what you need to activate in the kernel to get network support? 😉

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Written by Daniel aka CyReVolt 🐢 on 2025-01-21 at 21:25

@blinry That is what we created https://u-root.org for. It simplifies the whole initrd build thing, offers all the commands you know from Unix/Busybox/... and includes a versatile collection of bootloaders. We use it in many places as firmware. No need for UEFI whatsoever. :-)

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Written by SpaceLifeForm on 2025-01-21 at 23:59

@blinry

How tiny?

I built a 1.44MB floppy with 5K of writeable storage.

Linux 2.4.18 (Iirc), Minix FS, Busybox, uClibc, legacy grub, a couple of NIC drivers, CDROM support.

I actually used it to rescue a headless router.

I still have it. Still works fine on old kit.

[#]Linux

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Written by Rua on 2025-01-22 at 10:37

@blinry It's so tiny I can't read it. :blobfoxmlem:

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Written by 🌸 lily 🏳️‍⚧️ :flag_pansexual: :flag_ace: θΔ ⋐ & ∞ on 2025-01-22 at 10:39

@blinry@chaos.social i should try this again because i tried it about 5 times and it never worked

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Written by Daniel Bohrer on 2025-01-22 at 10:55

@blinry great writeup! I like the bottom-up approach! And I didn't know that qemu can do UEFI too!

As a bootloader you could try barebox (it's open source, and has a "menuconfig" too), which can be run from UEFI: https://www.barebox.org/doc/latest/boards/efi.html

If I remember correctly, you can just put it as EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI on the system partition and UEFI will boot it by default. (Although writing that, that might even work with the bzImage directly too…?)

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Written by Daniel Bohrer on 2025-01-22 at 10:59

@blinry regarding the futex bug in ping, you might have to enable the FUTEX symbol in the kernel menuconfig.

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Written by aziz on 2025-01-22 at 12:46

@blinry Great article. Much less daunting that LFS.

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