mini-rootfs/README at master · joyxu/mini-rootfs · GitHub

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Please see the LICENSE file for details on copying and usage.

What is mini-rootfs:

  Mini-rootfs combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a
  single small rootfs. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the
  utilities you usually find in bzip2, coreutils, dhcp, diffutils, e2fsprogs,
  file, findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, procps,
  sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim.  The utilities
  in mini-rootfs often have fewer options than their full-featured cousins;
  however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality
  and behave very much like their larger counterparts.

  Mini-rootfs has been produced with size-optimization and limited resources
  in mind, both to produce small binaries and to reduce run-time memory usage.
  Mini-rootfs (usually together with uClibc) has also been used as a component
  of "thin client" desktop systems, live-CD distributions, rescue disks,
  installers, and so on.

  Mini-rootfs provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small
  system, both embedded environments and more full featured systems concerned
  about space. Mini-rootfs is slowly working towards implementing the full
  Single Unix Specification V3
  (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/), but isn't there yet
  (and for size reasons will probably support at most UTF-8 for
  internationalization). We are also interested in passing the Linux Test
  Project (http://ltp.sourceforge.net).

----------------

Using mini-rootfs:

  Mini-rootfs is extremely configurable.  This allows you to include only
  the components and options you need, thereby reducing binary size. Run 'make
  config' or 'make menuconfig' to select the functionality that you wish to
  enable.  (See 'make help' for more commands.)

  The "standalone shell" mode is an easy way to try out mini-rootfs; this is
  a command shell that calls the built-in applets without needing them to be
  installed in the path.

----------------

Downloading the current source code:

  Source for the latest released version, as well as daily snapshots, can
  always be downloaded from

    https://github.com/open-estuary/mini-rootfs

----------------

Getting help:

  when you find you need help, you can check out the mini-rootfs forums at

  http://open-estuary.org/forums/

  or contact us by

  http://open-estuary.org/contact-us

----------------

Bugs:

  if you find bugs, please submit a detailed bug report to the mini-rootfs
  mailing list at support@open-estuary.org.  a well-written bug report should
  include a transcript of a shell session that demonstrates the bad behavior
  and enables anyone else to duplicate the bug on their own machine. the
  following is such an example:

    to: support@open-estuary.org
    from: diligent@testing.open-estuary.org
    subject: /bin/date doesn't work

    package: mini-rootfs
    version: 1.00

    when i execute 'date' it produces unexpected results.
    with gnu date i get the following output:

	$ date
	fri oct  8 14:19:41 mdt 2004

    but when i use mini-rootfs date i get this instead:

	$ date
	illegal instruction

    i am using debian unstable, kernel version 2.4.25-vrs2 on a netwinder,
    and the latest uclibc from cvs.

	-diligent

  note the careful description and use of examples showing not only what
  mini-rootfs does, but also a counter example showing what an equivalent app
  does (or pointing to the text of a relevant standard).  Bug reports lacking
  such detail may never be fixed...  Thanks for understanding.

----------------

Portability:

  Mini-rootfs is developed and tested on Linux 4.1 and 3.19.0 kernels, compiled
  with gcc (the unit-at-a-time optimizations in version 3.4 and later are
  worth upgrading to get, but older versions should work), and linked against
  uClibc (0.9.27 or greater) or glibc (2.2 or greater).  In such an
  environment, the full set of mini-rootfs features should work, and if
  anything doesn't we want to know about it so we can fix it.

  There are many other environments out there, in which mini-rootfs may build
  and run just fine.  We just don't test them.  Since mini-rootfs consists of
  a large number of more or less independent applets, portability is a question
  of which features work where.  Some mini-rootfs applets (such as cat and rm)
  are highly portable and likely to work just about anywhere, while others
  (such as insmod and losetup) require recent Linux kernels with recent C
  libraries.

  Earlier versions of Linux and glibc may or may not work, for any given
  configuration.  Linux 2.2 or earlier should mostly work (there's still
  some support code in things like mount.c) but this is no longer regularly
  tested, and inherently won't support certain features (such as long files
  and --bind mounts).  The same is true for glibc 2.0 and 2.1: expect a higher
  testing and debugging burden using such old infrastructure. (The mini-rootfs
  developers are not very interested in supporting these older versions, but
  will probably accept small self-contained patches to fix simple problems.)

  Some environments are not recommended.  Early versions of uClibc were buggy
  and missing many features: upgrade.  Linking against libc5 or dietlibc is
  not supported and not interesting to the mini-rootfs developers. (The first
  is obsolete and has no known size or feature advantages over uClibc, the
  second has known bugs that its developers have actively refused to fix.)
  Ancient Linux kernels (2.0.x and earlier) are similarly uninteresting.

Supported hardware:

  Mini-rootfs in general will build on any architecture supported by gcc.  We
  support both 32 and 64 bit platforms, and both big and little endian systems.

  Under 2.4 Linux kernels, kernel module loading was implemented in a
  platform-specific manner.  Mini-rootfs's insmod utility has been reported to
  work under ARM, CRIS, H8/300, x86, ia64, x86_64, m68k, MIPS, PowerPC, S390,
  SH3/4/5, Sparc, and v850e.  Anything else probably won't work.

  The module loading mechanism for the 2.6 kernel is much more generic, and
  we believe 2.6.x kernel module loading support should work on all
  architectures supported by the kernel.

----------------

Please feed suggestions, bug reports, insults, and bribes back to the mini-rootfs
mailing list:

	support@open-estuary.org

and/or maintainer:

	Feng liang
	<Chinafengliang@aliyun.com>