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Date:   Thu, 23 Aug 2018 20:54:17 +0200
From:   Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:     nicolas.pitre@linaro.org, josh@joshtriplett.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Kernel-only deployments?
Message-ID: <20180823185417.y3ung3b553f2d24a@angband.pl>
References: <20180823174359.GA13033@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 10:43:59AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> The mkinitramfs approach results in about 40MB of initrd, and dracut
> about 10MB.  Most of this is completely useless for rcutorture, which
> isn't interested in mounting filesystems, opening devices, and almost
> all of the other interesting things that mkinitramfs and dracut enable.
> 
> Those who know me will not be at all surprised to learn that I went
> overboard making the resulting initrd as small as possible.  I started
> by throwing out everything not absolutely needed by the dash and sleep
> binaries, which got me down to about 2.5MB, 1.8MB of which was libc.
> This situation of course prompted me to create an initrd containing
> a statically linked binary named "init" and absolutely nothing else
> (not even /dev or /tmp directories), which weighs in at not quite 800KB.
> This is a great improvement over 10MB, to say nothing of 40MB, but 800KB
> for a C-language "for" loop containing nothing more than a single call to
> sleep()?

.globl _start
.data
req:    .8byte 999999999, 999999999
.text
_start:
        mov     $35, %rax       # syscall: nanosleep
        mov     $req, %rdi
        xor     %rsi, %rsi
        syscall
        jmp     _start


as sl.s -o sl.o
ld sl.o -o init

'Ere you go, no libc needed.  If your arch is not amd64, just say so.

If you want to do anything more complex, though -- you really want musl
or another lightweight libc instead.  Glibc is utterly unfit for static
linking.


Meow!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ .globl _start↵.data↵rc: .ascii "/etc/init.d/rcS\0"↵.text↵_start
⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ mov $57,%rax↵syscall↵cmp $0,%rax↵jne child↵parent:↵mov $61,%rax
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ mov $-1,%rdi↵xor %rsi,%rsi↵xor %rdx,%rdx↵syscall↵jmp parent↵child:
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ mov $59,%rax↵mov $rc,%rdi↵xor %rsi,%rsi↵xor %rdx,%rdx↵syscall