On Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 7:47 PM Greg A. Woods wrote: > At Tue, 23 Feb 2021 16:15:52 -0500, Henry Bent > wrote: > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Abstractions > > > > It's also worth > > pointing out that NetBSD, in addition to having a separate /bin and > > /usr/bin, has /rescue which has a large selection of statically linked > > binaries. > > Indeed. However /rescue is really just a hack to avoid the problems > that occur when basic tools are dynamic-linked. > > My vastly preferred alternative is to static-link everything. > > Of course with C libraries these days that means the binaries can be > rather large -- albiet still relatively small in comparison to modern > disks. > > In any case I've also built NetBSD such that all of the base system > binaries are linked together into one binary (we call this "crunchgen", > but Linux usually calls it "Busybox(tm)"). I decided to put all the bin > directories together into one for the ultimate savings of space and time > and effort, but it would be trivial to keep the root and /usr split for > better managing application-specific embedded systems. > > This hard-static-linking of everything into one binary results in a > surprisingly small, indeed very tiny, system. For i386 (32-bit) it > could probably boot multiuser in about 16mb of RAM. > I booted a FreeBSD/i386 4 system, sans compilers and a few other things, off 16MB CF card in the early 2000s. I did both static (one binary) and dynamic and found dynamic worked a lot better for the embedded system... I also did a 8MB PoC router and data logger image that was stripped to the bone. PicoBSD fit onto a 1.44MB floppy as lat as FreeBSD 4 and made a good firewall... Warner What I've got so far is a bootable image file of a "complete" > NetBSD-5/i386 systems that's just a tiny bit over 7Mb. It contains a > kernel and a ramdisk image with a 12Mb filesystem containing a crunchgen > binary with almost everything in it (247 system programs, including all > the networking tools, but no named, and no toolchain, no mailer, and no > manual pages -- not atypical of what was delivered with some commercial > unix systems of days gone by, but of course updated with modern things > like ssh, etc..) > > -- > Greg A. Woods > > Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack > Planix, Inc. Avoncote Farms >