From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods@robohack.ca>
To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Abstractions
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2021 18:47:07 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m1lEkCi-0036x9C@more.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAEdTPBc-warK9hZxzTg8Shm4uM8+9oN2NmiurT1WWhohZM0yBg@mail.gmail.com>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1911 bytes --]
At Tue, 23 Feb 2021 16:15:52 -0500, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> 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.
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 <gwoods@acm.org>
Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>
[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP Digital Signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 195 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-02-24 2:47 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 35+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-02-23 19:37 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-02-23 21:02 ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-02-23 21:15 ` Henry Bent
2021-02-24 2:47 ` Greg A. Woods [this message]
2021-02-24 3:20 ` Warner Losh
2021-02-24 20:05 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-02-24 1:51 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-02-24 2:23 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-02-24 4:18 Rudi Blom
2021-02-21 10:47 Paul Ruizendaal
2021-02-20 23:09 M Douglas McIlroy
2021-02-21 8:15 ` Otto Moerbeek
2021-02-21 11:08 ` Rich Morin
2021-02-21 22:40 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-21 23:01 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-23 3:31 ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-02-22 0:13 ` Warren Toomey
2021-02-27 2:47 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-23 0:25 ` Wesley Parish
2021-02-23 0:38 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-23 2:50 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-02-23 3:19 ` Warner Losh
2021-02-23 1:47 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-02-21 22:54 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-15 19:56 Jon Steinhart
2021-02-15 21:52 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-16 7:13 ` arnold
2021-02-16 8:15 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-02-16 10:04 ` Wesley Parish
2021-02-16 19:59 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-02-17 4:01 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-02-17 6:50 ` Chris Hanson
2021-02-16 12:26 ` Rich Morin
2021-02-16 22:46 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-02-17 12:09 ` David Arnold
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=m1lEkCi-0036x9C@more.local \
--to=woods@robohack.ca \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).