miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD 39
dnaumov writes "miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD is a great guide, which explains in great detail, how you can create a truly small installation of FreeBSD on your system, completely by yourself. There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many. The guide will walk you through things like creating the directory tree inside a chroot jail, rebuilding the bootloader and everything else needed to create a FreeBSD install that takes just around 20 MB of space."
Amazingly, almost half of that is perl! (Score:4, Interesting)
emphasis mine.
Re:Amazingly, almost half of that is perl! (Score:1, Informative)
Your "emphasis" seems like pointless perl bashing to me.
Re:Amazingly, almost half of that is perl! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:2)
Why not just use OpenBSD without any optional crypto crap? Or NetBSD?
With no perl etc, the minimal install should be small, although i havent tried.
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:3, Redundant)
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:1)
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:2)
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:1)
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it doesn't support SMP, but I don't consider that to be much of a drawback. SMP isn't all that popular, and would likely be even less so in these types of machines.
If you still want to site hardware/SMP support as a major issue, I can point out that Linux supports even more hardware, and (supposedly) has far better SMP support.
As for the advantages of OpenBSD, it is smaller, far less complex to setup/configure/maintain, more secure, and has plenty of great programs that FreeBSD lacks (Systrace and PF kick ass).
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:1)
Hmm, how much smaller? Do you have number at hand or just think so?
I don't see much complexity in FreeBSD setup/configure/maintain... If OpenBSD even less complex then it's missing some features?
Do you have bigger list of "great programs that FreeBSD lacks"? BTW there is a systrace port for FreeBSD -http://www.citi.umi
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, emBSD (small OpenBSD distro) fits on a 32MB flash card with room to spare, and that includes SSH, IPSec, pf, network card drivers, etc. No doubt it could be made much smaller.
It's not missing any features, it's just a better, simpler, configuration system. Try it some time, rather than just complaining about what you don't know.
No other firewall software out there has anything like PF-Auth. Then there is ALTQ which has been merged with PF to allow complex bandwidth limiting. PF also has SCRUB and MODULATE STATE directives, which clean up packets, and provide more security for the network. Then there is all of PF's advanced options.
Those were just off the top of my head... There are certainly more. You are welcome to install OpenBSD and find out for yourself. And it's good to hear the systrace port is finished.
Well, the one place that FreeBSD has an advantage is kernel startup times on slow hardware. After startup, it should run jut as fast. Besides, it sounds like you haven't tried it in some time (or on very modern hardware)... It was around Release 2.8 that OpenBSD got a big speed boost.
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:2)
Not true. FreeBSD's performance is only nominally better.
Security is a very complex animal that you obviously don't understand... Either that or you are just trolling.
That doesn't mean NetBSD is any more secure, just that NetBSD isn't commonly used in
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:1)
FreeBSD 5.0 will not have perl as a part of the OS. I think the installation will install it, but it is not a part of the base system and you are free to remove it without worries.
Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD? (Score:2)
PicoBSD (Score:2, Redundant)
A new possible BSD ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A new possible BSD ? (Score:2)
I've used this port to make a FreeBSD-specific boot disk like tomsrtbt, but with more horsepower.
I think a few minor modifications to the cdroot port will do what you want.
Good luck.
Re:A new possible BSD ? (Score:4, Interesting)
This thread, if you read all of it, suggests that a new BSD would be a little to much and that it may be better for it to be part of FreeBSD as either an option or a seperate script.
If you read the miniBSD there are scripts that do the coping for files from the real system to the directory that is going to be the compact flash directory. He starts out by telling the user to make world, which essentially tells people to build the system from the gound up. Also making sure to make NO static binaries. On most systems you may want static binaries, in case the system had an improper shutdown.If sh is shared and the shared libs are in /usr/lib (where they are on FreeBSD) then you would not be able to run sh if you could not mount /usr. In his scenerio it is a compact flash card that is being used and it is mounted read only ALL the time. If you do this to your system then you could cut down the size of the system.
Also there is pam to think about. My FreeBSD 4.7 system has pam on by default. He does not mention this. So when I used his mklibs.pl script it did not get the pam libs and the system was pretty hosed.
Oh and I have managed to cut FreeBSD down to about 72Megs with sshd running and bind 9, ipsec, and ipfw2, natd, and console access. Still I am looking at how to cut down more and still not loose functionality.
I think the real solution would be a project in the ports that would allow an automated minibsd system to be built. i.e. run script x and make a few choices and it builds the system for you. Options could be include sshd, include bind 8 or 9, include perl or not and get your customizish system that way.
Re:A new possible BSD ? (Score:1)
PicoBSD and miniBSD have two different goals (Score:4, Informative)
miniBSD has a different aim of not so much tweaking, for example in PicoBSD SSH daemon and client are just two aspects of one program instead of two sperate programs because of all the shared code between them, it's more meant to run on compact flash and is easier to update since PicoBSD is a compressed bootable image
Packagizing "base" (Score:4, Interesting)
I think starting with this "miniBSD" and adding everything else back in might be the right way to do it.
Size? (Score:2, Funny)
Are there any miniBSD's akin to uClinux? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been a while since I bothered checking to see if such a thing as an 'embedded BSD distro' existed, guess it's time to suss it out
Re:Are there any miniBSD's akin to uClinux? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/
Re:Are there any miniBSD's akin to uClinux? (Score:2)
Re:Are there any miniBSD's akin to uClinux? (Score:2)
If you look at netbsd's ports page you'll note that it says, "NetBSD should be portable to just about any 32bit or larger machine with an MMU. Machines without an MMU would be more work."
So while it is possible to port Netbsd to non-mmu machines it is a bit more work. It should be noted there are 7 Netbsd ports to arm, 11 ports to mips, and I think none to Coldfire's. They list further arm ports as being fairly trivial to do. They do n
Script to remove parts with make buildworld (Score:1)
Is something I would like to see. For example if I buldworld with NOUUCP in /etc/make.conf, I don't want the old binaries hanging around. A make deinstall UUCP option in /usr/src/Makefile would be handy :)