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alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 160  

init bloat

https://firasuke.github.io/DOTSLASHLINU … initramfs/
sounds like a fun project for a cold winter day

steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 396  

Re: init bloat

How is this news (or "myth", "legend", "the truth", "nightmare", other infantile hyperbole in your link), or even particularly useful (beyond embedded systems with miserably small storage)?

Yes, you can compile in all the drivers you need and boot without dynamic /dev or early module loading. That's how it was done when compiling your own kernel was normal practice and booting from a floppy disk was a thing.
It's still quite possible to go that way, assuming you know what drivers you need to mount root. Systemd might make life difficult, but that's nothing new either.

I still have a bunch of Slackware 7 boot disks on my desk, and besides needing to pick the right one for your hardware (because that's the price for no initrd and a 1.4MB kernel), there's nothing particularly fun or novel about them... They're just minimal kernel images with disk controller and filesystem drivers compiled in.
So what? I mean it's trivial to boot even modern Slackware without an initrd, why the big writeup? That "guide" makes it sound like the dude just rediscovered fire or something

Last edited by steve_v (2024-11-01 09:05:48)

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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 160  

Re: init bloat

things dont always have to be useful, all i said is, it sounds like a fun project
at least its news to me^^

i get why distro use initramfs
but from a more philosophical standpoint, its unnecessary bloat if you know your drivers

GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-16

Posts: 570  

Re: init bloat

Hi alphaalpha. I dual boot Devuan and Tiny Core Linux. You may find it interesting that TCL does the opposite of what you're considering: It crams the entire (very tiny) OS into the initramfs. The result is a system that runs from RAM and is very fast.

More details at the links:

https://distrowatch.com/weekly-mobile.p … 23#feature

http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html

Have fun with initramfs. It's s good way to understand how linux works.

alphalpha

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-01-23

Posts: 160  

Re: init bloat

thanks GNUser,
that certainly is interesting

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2017-04-07

Posts: 658  

Website

Re: init bloat

Cool, thanks for the link! One of these days i'm going to try and compile my own kernel for a specific machine and chop the heck outta everything to see how small I can get it all. Fun project for a minimalist like me who likes to mess with things.

I'm even more motivated these days since current kernel on my machine is 408 mb, wow, I remember when they were much smaller....

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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 442  

Re: init bloat

Since decades ago, I've always built a custom kernel for my main PC.   My current 6.* kernel is only 7.8 MB (compressed), and it runs X11, alsa sound, network, keyboard, and other peripherals just fine.  I hand-built the machine and selected the parts myself, so I know exactly what drivers I need. Everything mandatory (SCSI drivers, FS drivers, graphics, etc.) is compiled-in, optional things like USB drivers are compiled as modules and only loaded on demand.  About 95% of the stuff that comes in stock kernels are absent because I don't need them.

(Stock kernels come with all kinds of bells and whistles because they have to be compatible with every imaginable hardware a common user might conceivably be using.  That's why compiling your own kernel will almost always save lots of space, because you can leave out (lots of) stuff you know you won't use.)

(I don't even have the driver for the built-in PC speaker compiled -- because I find it annoying and useless. So my PC is completely silent except when I actually tell it to play an audio through alsa. It saves me the annoyance of having to listen to beeping sounds from the terminal. :-P)

For my work PCs I'm too lazy to go through the trouble of handcrafting the system like this. Plus, policy-mandated hardware tend to be gratuitously incompatible with random stuff. So I just use the stock distro kernel instead... because my employer pays me to work not configure Linux kernels.