(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[technosaurus]

here is a screeny of my ~2s booting kernel - It has almost everything but the essentials to get to X with jwm and rxvt so for most people it will be just a toy ... ironically that is why I made it - so my kids can't accidentally bork something up (can't mount drives or access any networks - just play games)

If anyone is interested I can post my .config and a tarball of the initramfs

The bzImage (from 2.6.32.50 source) is only 1437k including the builtin Xvesa, jwm and rxvt ... so it should even fit on a floppy. (really I could get it down to ~1mb with a busybox recompile with only needed applets -- and could cut resource usage to as low as ~4mb)

[Bert]

That's very impressive technosaurus!

Shouldn't the "everything" on the first line of your post be "nothing"? Or do I need extra English lessons

[Karl Godt]

[technosaurus]

Ok here it is, Puppy in <1mb in a single bzImage

Resource usage in X with jwm running and an rxvt terminal open:
MEMUSAGEKB=5020 (with background) 2892kb without background image

Resource usage at the console:
MEMUSAGEKB=2288

I wanted to see how far I could go so I ended up disabling even proc and sys, (which breaks top and ps) so I needed a way to get memory usage. I also replaced busybox with dash and mount from embutils (sh is used by rxvt which also needs /dev/pts so needed to mount a devpts) and just for grins i wrote my own init in C . I could get the resource usage down under 2Mb if jwm were compiled with only X11 with maybe xpm support and used st instead of rxvt

here is the code I wrote for memused

[PANZERKOPF]

[nooby]

But what does it take then to make all the needed changes?
I feel so dense. If it is this easy then why don't the devs of
Lupu or slacko use part of it to speed up the boot of those OS?

[Aitch]

techno

Would I be right in saying microsaurus is only for playing games/videos?
Is it potentially useful as a puppy rescue tool on a floppy? i.e. can mount drives/partitions or edit/copy/paste things be added? Can any network/browser be added?
Do we just write/copy the image to floppy?
I like the sound of 1/2 second boot....

Aitch

[nooby]

Yes would be cool if you can make something like a rescue thing
for USB and CD/DVD but I don't mind if it works as frugal install on HD

[PANZERKOPF]

[gcmartin]

@Techno
that's impressive for getting something booted in a box.

Now, could this be extended to a need (practical one) where I need a router service which runs the following fron X-desktop

• DNSMASQ
  
• Web server
  
• full SAMBA server

in a 32MB RAM platform? I don't care about the ISO size as that is unimportant to me, I am only concerned about it running in RAM. And, it must be able to use USB storage, LAN Motherboard peripherals along with wireless

This is the smallest useful application platform I could think of for using a small system. (The web server is optional.)

Hmmm...
edited: (even though I envision practical use, to do this is probably not possible)

[nooby]

[Lobster]

[seaside]

[technosaurus]

The funny thing is that even though this version has no usb support built in, it doesn't matter because once the usb bootloader hands it over the kernel doesn't yet know where it is, it just un-lzma's itself and runs.

As far as building upon it, you can use an initrd.lzma image similar to what puppy uses (an lzma'd cpio archive) for playing games or whatever without risk of damaging anything ... I am currently running it in qemu with:
qemu-system-i386 -kernel bzImage -cpu kvm32 -alt-grab
(I use the alt-grab so I can Ctrl+Alt+Backspace in it while running Xvesa/Xorg with "-nozap" )

Here is the asterisk:
it currently has no file system support other than initramfs
only very basic hardware support needed for Xvesa (no sound)
also no tcp support (thus no internet)
no module support, means none of this can be added without recompiling the kernel (it only takes a couple minutes)
it is basically allnoconfig + vesa framebuffer, vm86, devpts, initramfs, lzma, unix sockets + AT keyboard and ps2 mouse (with synaptic extensions)
I also did some expert level configuration to remove all the debugging and gnu-isms and used more sane values for things like the number of devpts (reduced from 512 to 16 to save ~8mb RAM usage) ... its all in the DOTconfig

Now that the asterisk is explained, it should be more straightforward to start adding things back to the kernel to support other options. For the web server with X, enable tcp in the kernel and put the webserver+content either directly into the initramfs or a separate initrd.lzma(s) ... you can't do it in qemu, but many bootloaders support multiple initrd's, so you could have additional initrd's for separate sites etc... could be good for a web browser too
I will likely test internet stuff with dillo1 when I do my gtk1 build using minimum profit text editor, dillo, emelfm, Xdialog, mtpaint and aumix... will only add ~1Mb + maybe .5mb for the needed kernel options and support files... the hardest part will be figuring out how to set up my puppy qemu host so that I can connect.

btw, does anyone know the "record" for fast booting?

Edit: almost forgot to mention arm ... yes, arm could be done in a similar way using qemu and Rob Landley's cross compilers - just change the arch from 586 to arm[*] in the kernel - nothing else is platform specific AFAIK except maybe vesa, but you will also want usb, usbhid and usb mouse for the Pi.

[Lobster]