trumeet / minirec

An experimental project. Recommended memory >= 512M. x86_64

MiniRec

An experimental project that builds a minimal Linux system with the capability of repairing a broken system (a.k.a. recovery disc).

Highlights

• Only 14M! (Although it's still way too big)

• Uses buildroot to compile the kernel as well as programs

• Contains various of commonly used packages, for example, zip, xz, unrar, p7zip, fdisk (does not support creating GPT table), gdisk, and various of FS tools and programs.

• Uses BusyBox as its init system as well as shell. BusyBox provides numerous of utilities.

• Self-contained EFI Stub application, with root image builtin.

• Network is not supported.

• Various of FS support in kernel (for example, Btrfs, Xfs, NTFS...). NVME support enabled.

• My experimental project :D

Why not ArchLinux ISO?

• Focuses on repairing.

• Tiny. ArchLinux ISO is about ~650MB in size.

• Trying compiling Linux from "scratch" (although buildroot had done so many things for me)

Requirements

Tested on QEMU:

• x86-64 system

• 512M RAM

Usage

• Download the latest .efi in the releases page.

• Boot the .efi application.

• That's it!

Build

Make sure you have 7G free space of disk.

• Clone this repo with submodules.

• cd to buildroot

• make -jN BR2_EXTERNAL=../minirec_tree/ minirec_defconfig

• make -jN

Sit back and relax. 请坐和放宽。

This might take several minutes hours. Depending on your environment. It took half a hour on my machine with -j9 (XPS 13 9360).

Output: output/images/linux.efi.

Development

1. Do not make changes directly to buildroot/.config. Use make nconfig instead.

2. After making changes to your buildroot config, use make -jN savedefconfig to export the puerified config to the board tree.

3. If you wish to change the kernel config, use make -jN linux-nconfig. The same, use make -jN linux-update-defconfig to export the puerified linux kernel config.

4. Make sure buildroot/ is clean (no changes are made), by using git status.

5. All changes should be made in the device tree.

Disclaimer

This is an experimental project. It's only used for:

• Debugging & Learning for myself.

• Experiencing the path myself.

• Doing some side-projects.

It does not:

• Guarantee any SLA.

• Work for all of you.

• Guarantee to not damage your data. Your data may be damaged as potential bugs.

• Provide LTS, or actively maintenance.

• Provide fixes or feedbacks on issues.

• Be end user friendly, or have a highly detailed document.

Use it as your own risk.

Licenses

GPL v2.

linuxx64.efi.stub comes from systemd.