On Fri, Mar 11, 2011, Dave Martin wrote: > As I understand it, debootstrap or germinate basically do the right > thing. All we would need would be to document the use of the existing > tools, and provide suitable ultra-minimal seeds (at the level of > busybox+libc only) and/or an ultra-minimal --variant for debootstrap.
So far, the two approaches which had been proposed were: * an initramfs-tools based initrd which would copy selected binaries manually; this probably gives a very minimal root image, but it's a bit cumbersome to manage for us * a classic seed based image; this is convenient to generate, but it's not particularly small The custom debootstrap script you're proposing is one way; I would also think we could consider the udeb route: udebs are meant to be small and used in Debian Installer which offers a rescue system. D-I also has fancy things like openssh, and can retrieve additional components from the network -- as long as they are udeb-ified. D-I images already exist as initrds today, with very small sizes; you can browse random image types under http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-armel/current/images/ Even full images not requiring the network to start the installer like the hd-media boot image have an easy time beating our current sizes: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/ (this is i386 as there is no armel one) Note that boot.img above is 24M compressed and 250M decompressed, but I'm assuming we can use a compressed initrd for everything so that the compressed size would be what matters. Cheers, -- Loïc Minier _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
