[ANN] New 'base-image' created (Was: [RFC] Add ipkg to minimal image)

[ANN] New 'base-image' created (Was: [RFC] Add ipkg to minimal image)

[Rod Whitby]

Based on the good discussion and constructive feedback related to my RFC
about adding ipkg to minimal image, I have decided to create a new
image, whose name truly reflects it's intention.

I hereby name 'base-image' as the smallest possible image which allows
you to ssh into a device via it's native network interface, and install
packages from feeds across the network into internal flash or onto an
attached storage device.

It is "larger" than minimal-image (cause a number of people quite
rightly wanted minimal image to strictly remain only that which is
required to boot and get ssh access to the device, and nothing else),
but is "smaller" than console-image (which has a whole lot of stuff in
it which could easily be installed over the network from package feeds
after boot rather than being in the initial rootfs).

It is required to always be small enough to fit in the internal flash of
an NSLU2 (as an example of the smaller end of flash sizes that OE
supports), and features will be removed from the image to ensure that
this is always the case.  Any feature that can be installed using the
package manager after the first boot is always fair game for removal at
any time, and patches are welcome to make base-image as small as
possible while still retaining the ability to subsequently install that
feature.  Yes, this size restriction is part of the definition of this
image.

Since there was no clear consensus on how to indicate which package
manager is used by a particular distro, I have defaulted it to ipkg.
Patches are welcome to make it support other package management systems
(i.e. deb), but these must be done in a distro-independent way (i.e. you
must RFC and get agreement on how *all* of OE chooses a package manager,
not just how one particular distro chooses a package manager), since
this image is designed to work with any distro, not just (for example)
Angstrom.

-- Rod

Re: [ANN] New 'base-image' created (Was: [RFC] Add ipkg to minimal image)

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello Rod,

Sunday, December 16, 2007, 11:20:59 AM, you wrote:

> Based on the good discussion and constructive feedback related to my RFC
> about adding ipkg to minimal image, I have decided to create a new
> image, whose name truly reflects it's intention.

> I hereby name 'base-image' as the smallest possible image which allows
> you to ssh into a device via it's native network interface, and install
> packages from feeds across the network into internal flash or onto an
> attached storage device.

  Great news!

[]

> It is required to always be small enough to fit in the internal flash of
> an NSLU2 (as an example of the smaller end of flash sizes that OE
> supports).

  So, how little size did you achieve? I wonder, if we'd finally be able
to put kiddy distros like this: http://midge.vlad.org.ua/wiki/ (didn't
merge even with OpenWRT AFAIK) to rest ;-).

[]

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                            mailto:pmiscml@gmail.com

Re: [ANN] New 'base-image' created (Was: [RFC] Add ipkg to minimal image)

[Rod Whitby]

Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
> Sunday, December 16, 2007, 11:20:59 AM, you wrote:
>> It is required to always be small enough to fit in the internal flash of
>> an NSLU2 (as an example of the smaller end of flash sizes that OE
>> supports).
> 
>   So, how little size did you achieve?

Not as small as I would like.  I did it using standard task-boot and a
couple of task-base packages, rather than do a custom package set up-front.

I expect it will be a good test case for determining what is appropriate
in task-base-foo packages ...

Be prepared for some packages to be removed - there is still a lot of
fat in there which is not strictly required by the defined image package
inclusion criteria.

-- Rod

Re: [ANN] New 'base-image' created (Was: [RFC] Add ipkg to minimal image)

[Koen Kooi]

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Rod Whitby schreef:
> Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
>> Sunday, December 16, 2007, 11:20:59 AM, you wrote:
>>> It is required to always be small enough to fit in the internal flash of
>>> an NSLU2 (as an example of the smaller end of flash sizes that OE
>>> supports).
>>   So, how little size did you achieve?
> 
> Not as small as I would like.  I did it using standard task-boot and a
> couple of task-base packages, rather than do a custom package set up-front.

I suspect the 'stretch' OE has to generate tiny rootfs images using
standard recipes has been a bit exhausted. We should have a look at the
packages themselves, e.g. slimming down busybox and uclibc, as well as
using busybox as init and login to remove the need to sysvinit and
tinylogin (security issues aside).
Once the OE testlab comes online we can see what certain images contain,
how big the individual packages are, and more importantly, how those
change over time.

regards,

Koen

- --
koen@dominion.kabel.utwente.nl will go go away in december 2007, please
use k.kooi@student.utwente.nl instead.

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