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by throwaway_391 2527 days ago
Alpine Linux is a reasonably small (20mb) Linux distribution, I've seen it run on bare metal but it's more common to see it in Docker environments.

Building minimal bootable to be very small is possible, but is difficult in comparison to an apt install - I imagine for the most part porting docker container configs to a bootable OS might be the best approach for small-medium projects.
2 comments
eyberg 2527 days ago
This is brought up quite a lot and isn't answered correctly enough in my opinion.

The problem with this approach is that you can make it as small as you want but it's still Linux. At a certain point are you going to start patching things out like support for users? Support for management of multiple processes? There's a non-trivial set of syscalls and data structures designed solely for these constructs. You can't just seccomp it and call it a day.

For us it's not about the size (that's nice of course) but it's more about the performance and security.

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throwaway_391 2524 days ago
Size, Content. Pick one.

I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, but it's there. I'm sure there's more minimal, and less minimal options available.

I don't think there's any security impacts with using alpine Linux specifically, aside from default credentials in a bunch of containers a few months back.

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geggam 2527 days ago
I miss Trinux ( ramdrive boot from floppy fits in 12MB ram OS )

http://trinux.sourceforge.net/legacy/

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yjftsjthsd-h 2527 days ago
I suppose Tiny Core Linux is the modern equivalent.
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