Tried out doing this kind of stuff a while back to create a custom user space, and I found that suckless’ init, sinit, was quite educational for how to deal with init’s responsibilities in a super minimal way: https://core.suckless.org/sinit/
Boot Naked Linux
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#32> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick ..
Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist?
In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothing for the tech industry to ruin because only 0.01% of people owned a setup with an SSD. And neither Linux, NT or Mach were optimized for them. Hell, to this day Linux' VM system is by default still tuned for swap and slow HDDs (swappiness 60 and all that) because no one has bothered to update the defaults.
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#33> I found “Building a tiny Linux from scratch” which does most of what I do here but in Rust and a year ago Linux from scratch seems to still be doing fine at: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org . It's going on 27 years now. > yeah, I know, proper C code needs to be scattered with return value checks and sensible reports of errno. I’ve left these out for clarity. Somewhere, a LLM is trained on this code as we speak :)…
> Somewhere, a LLM is trained on this code as we speak :) If we collectively have to change the way we do things to better fit our tools rather than changing our tools to fit what we would naturally like to do, then we've failed as an industry.
Hmm LLM hype aside, remember the first writing system (Grafitti) for PalmOS?
Change the way you write to obtain much better recognition.
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#34I... fail to see the point of running just one process. If it's just a PoC, then: 1) I remember seeing a linux firewall/gateway set up to run with just the kernel, without any userspace at all. Completely unhackable. 2) To print some text or run a simple program, I belive DOS without a memory manager would be even faster. 3) It takes 1s to boot linux, but an ordinary PC takes 10s to get to that linux. Even U-boot on…
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Re: Boot Naked Linux
#35I do the “Linux from Scratch” challenge every few years and the last time I did it, I got as far as I needed to be able to build antirez’ LOAD81[1] directly from single mode in a few seconds.. it was so satisfying. I lost the image in some later admin task, but I’m going to do it again, and maybe see about adding threads and SQLite support to LOAD81 alongside the other goodies, just for the fun of it ..
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#36> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick .. Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist? In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothi…
Or they meant 2010s?
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#37> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick .. Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist? In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothi…
I distinctly remember buying my first SSD laptop in 2012 and being amazed at the boot time. At the time, I didn't realize it was because of the SSD, I just thought, "wow, the devs have made some fantastic optimizations in boot time!"
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#38I bought a couple of $60 refurbs online. This is perfect!
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#39> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick .. Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist? In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothi…
They probably meant 2010s.
I remember this was the time when Google started pushing the Chromebook idea and highlighting how it could boot in "just a few seconds". One of the earliest models I got as a dogfooding device probably needed 20 seconds to boot or so. Nice, compared to the awful boot times of machines with HDDs... but not stellar.
But then, in 2011, my wife bought a MacBook Air with an SSD and I was blown away. That thing booted to a full desktop (and not the joke that ChromeOS was) in... 5, 6 seconds? It was ridiculous.
And we have lost all of those gains. I find it painful to witness how a recent Mac chews through I/O during boot or doing any sort of software update (iStat Menus is great to watch this sort of thing), and how these feel slower to that early experience of 15 years ago :-/
Re: Boot Naked Linux
#40> .. There was a brief moment in the early 2000s where the newly introduced SSDs made booting quick .. Anyone else reading this and getting the feeling someone is reminiscing about a past they didn't live and thus are seeing it through rose-colored glasses because it didn't exist? In the early 2000s, SSDs had an obscene price tag of ~$1000 per gigabyte, so even an 8GB drive would cost you about $8000. There was nothi…
I distinctly remember buying my first SSD laptop in 2012 and being amazed at the boot time. At the time, I didn't realize it was because of the SSD, I just thought, "wow, the devs have made some fantastic optimizations in boot time!"
I wrote a batch script that that opened the entire Creative Suite in parallel and couldn't believe how much faster it was than just launching just Flash would have been on the old drive.