The first release of the Floppinux distribution has been presented, in which an attempt was made to create a minimalist distribution that fits within the size of a 3.5-inch floppy disk, using the latest versions of system components such as the Linux kernel 5.13.0-rc2 and the busybox utility set 1.33.1.
The size of the prepared boot image is 1.44MiB, where the kernel occupies 632KiB and the user space components take up 552KiB. There is 272KiB of free space remaining for user applications (du -h). The minimum system requirements include hardware with an i486DX processor and 24 MB of RAM.
The developer has prepared a guide that allows for the composition of a similar minimalist image for use on embedded systems with limited resources as a shell for booting its own specialized applications. QEMU can be used for testing ("qemu-system-i386 -fda floppinux.img").
The kernel and busybox are compiled using the minimally possible initial configuration ("make ARCH=x86 tinyconfig" and "make allnoconfig"). RAM disk, TTY, printk, ELF support, and script header parsing for "#!" are enabled in the kernel. Busybox is built with static linking and includes utilities such as vi, ash, mount, umount, init, less, cat, du, echo, ls, sleep, uname, poweroff, clear, and reboot. Syslinux is used for booting.
Source: opennet.ru
