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Author: Didier Kryn
Date:  
To: KatolaZ
CC: dng, Rainer Weikusat
Subject: Re: [DNG] Unofficial Devuan live images
Le 20/05/2016 14:37, KatolaZ a écrit :
> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 02:24:07PM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
>> Le 20/05/2016 13:11, KatolaZ a écrit :
>>>>>      If you mean to run your live system with the cdrom as the root
>>>>> filesystem, then the only drivers you need during the initramfs
>>>>> phase are those needed to mount the cdrom, ie the iso9660 filesystem
>>>>> and the drivers needed to access the cdrom, which includes the USB
>>>>> stack in case of a separate cdrom drive.
>>> You need a few more things for a generic live, e.g. support for all
>>> the disk controllers, support for aufs and other union filesystems,
>>> the full USB stack, and several drivers from the scsi/ bundle, which
>>> are needed to deal with cdroms...
>>      Yes, you must include everything needed to read the cdrom. It's
>> true it includes the scsi bundle and the USB stack, but not the disk
>> controllers. And support for union filesystems only if they are
>> needed to mount the cdrom ( don't see why). My own trend would be to
> Because the minimal live uses a squashfs, which is mounted and
> union-ed before init is called, AFAIK. The disk controllers are not
> necessary (and in fact I have stripped them off from the microscopic
> version of the initramfs), but might be useful if you want to use the
> live image as a rescue cd, and boot into an existing / on your
> drive. Not necessary. Maybe useful.

     The disk controllers need to be on the live cd for sure, but why in 
the initramfs?

>
>> rebuild the kernel with those drivers statically linked and boot
>> directly to the cdrom without and initramfs.
>>
> Oh, sure we could. But my point is to use standard packages from the
> Devuan repo, without too much of customising/recompiling.


     I was just thinking of a minimal hack: starting from Devuan's 
kernel config, just change a few drivers' build-mode from module to 
static. After all, do you think it's more of a hack than stripping the 
initramfs? But I admit it's a different journey than the one you have 
undertaken.


> Otherwise we
> could also recompile everything with uclibc, as done in other minimal
> distro, and have a truly microscopic userland, but that would be
> *another* distribution, not a Devuan ;)
>


     Musl libc is already a serious challenge :-) Uclibc a nightmare, 
too incompatible with glibc.


     Sorry if I look harsh, providing recommendations to people who do 
the real job :-) ideas come out of the conversation and I just like to 
share them with knowledgeable people.


     Didier