Arch Linux

neurolysis

Member

Registered: 2011-02-23

Posts: 112

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Changing init to busybox

Hi,

I'm currently doing an experiment a machine with 32MB RAM to try and use as little memory as possible when running Arch. I've exhausted the obvious, now I want to change some more fundamental things. I downsized to two TTYs and switched them to fgetty, which seems to have taken a few MB off -- I talked to some others and one thing that was suggested was changing init to busybox. This interests me. I know I would have to do this through the boot line, but after about 20 minutes of googling, I've not came across anything particularly useful. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Last edited by neurolysis (2011-03-13 11:32:48)

Digit

Member

Registered: 2008-04-28

Posts: 71

Re: Changing init to busybox

that's funny, i'm looking to do pretty much the same.

i thought for sure this would have already been covered in the archlinux wiki, but closest i saw was
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Se … ng_busybox
(which goes on about far more besides just going for a busybox archlinux)

you may also find some more useful background tips in this thread:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=860023
(before it veers off to mentions of existing small distros)

there are loads of metnions of busybox (particularly in other languages) in the wiki, i've yet to go through them.

sry i cant offer more direct and clear assistance.  i'm still looking into this myself.

it should be much easier than i think it is though, since mkinitcpio uses glibc and busybox in the boot process.

---

fave quote of the mo': "Man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for." - Robert Browning

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: Changing init to busybox

I replaced quite a bit of core stuff with busybox for my personal mini Arch-based liveusb toy, but init wasn't one of them. It'd require more than just little tweaks to the init scripts. Starting with busybox's inittab being completely different. Continuing with there are no runlevels in busybox init. You also can't replace bash with busybox ash (which I think would decrease ram usage), because there's a lot of bashisms in Arch's init scripts, the biggest issue being arrays.