[gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Sascha Lucas]

Hi,

I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way:

1) install everything you need
2) note current system time
3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo
4) remount with noatime
5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you
    note in 2)
6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need
    them?

What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?

THX,

Sascha.

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 12:01 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way:
> 
> 1) install everything you need
> 2) note current system time
> 3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo
> 4) remount with noatime
> 5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you
>     note in 2)
> 6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need
>     them?
> 
> What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?

no

what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
etc?

look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs.

> 
> THX,
> 
> Sascha.
> 
> -- 
> Air conditioned environment - do not open windows!

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Sascha Lucas]

> no
>
> what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
> etc?

I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a 
datacollector. Pleas tell me what is cro?

> look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs.

I already did this. There you can specify what files/packages to 
remove..... my intention is to know every file that can be removed.

Sascha.

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RE: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Michael Kintzios]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sascha Lucas [mailto:sascha.lucas@rus.uni-stuttgart.de] 
> Sent: 22 September 2005 13:01
> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
> 
> 
> > no
> >
> > what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
> > etc?
> 
> I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a 
> datacollector. Pleas tell me what is cro?

I believe he meant cron.

Besides cron jobs and associated executables, there's files which are
accessed intermittently and written/read from even more sparsely.
Unless you somehow log the file paths for all such interactions how will
you ever know what to delete and what not?  I guess you can keep backups
and experiment so that you don't find out something's missing the hard
way, next time you decide to reboot.
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Mick


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RE: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Dave Nebinger]

> What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?

I don't think it stands a snowball's chance in ...  Well, you get the idea.

Sascha, I'm thinking that if you start with a bare-bones handbook install
you'll have a minimum system, at least for gentoo support.  It won't have X,
desktops, many of the services & tools, etc.

If you're thinking about an embedded device (i.e. a router) then you
wouldn't want to use a source-based install like gentoo on it, you'd either
want to use a binary distribution (many examples of minimum linux
distributions out there, check http://www.distrowatch.com for variations) or
you could create a home-brew distribution from a customized setup based upon
gentoo, but a hand-generated distrib could be difficult to pull together
(difficult to identify all of necessary files that must be on the distro).
 


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RE: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Dave Nebinger]

> What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?

I don't think it stands a snowball's chance in ...  Well, you get the idea.

Sascha, I'm thinking that if you start with a bare-bones handbook install
you'll have a minimum system, at least for gentoo support.  It won't have X,
desktops, many of the services & tools, etc.

If you're thinking about an embedded device (i.e. a router) then you
wouldn't want to use a source-based install like gentoo on it, you'd either
want to use a binary distribution (many examples of minimum linux
distributions out there, check http://www.distrowatch.com for variations) or
you could create a home-brew distribution from a customized setup based upon
gentoo, but a hand-generated distrib could be difficult to pull together
(difficult to identify all of necessary files that must be on the distro).
 


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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[A. Khattri]

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Sascha Lucas wrote:

> I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a
> datacollector.

You might want to look at GNAP from the Embedded Gentoo project - it
sounds close to the minimal setup you are looking for.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml

To get the tools: emerge gnap gnap-dev

Im interested in this and currently also working my way through O'Reilly's
"Building Embedded Linux Systems" book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/belinuxsys/



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[gentoo-user] Re: idea about small footprint gentoo

[Francesco Talamona]

On Thursday 22 September 2005 15:33, Michael Kintzios wrote:
> Besides cron jobs and associated executables, there's files which are
> accessed intermittently and written/read from even more sparsely.
> Unless you somehow log the file paths for all such interactions how
> will you ever know what to delete and what not?  I guess you can keep
> backups and experiment so that you don't find out something's missing
> the hard way, next time you decide to reboot.

It's way easier to mount the partition with "atime" option to track 
every file access time.

Search for -atime -anewer and similar "find" options.

Anyway this kind of approach can lead to instabilities, when it comes 
the moment your pc enters a state it never entered before and need a 
file deleted for scarce usage...

Double check what to delete, and leave everything unknown in its 
place :-)

Just my 2cts

Ciao
	Francesco
-- 
Linux Version 2.6.12-gentoo-r9, Compiled #2 Wed Aug 24 18:43:16 CEST 
2005
One 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 Processor, 2GB RAM, 4325.37 Bogomips Total
aemaeth
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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 14:00 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
> > no
> >
> > what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
> > etc?
> 
> I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a 
> datacollector. Pleas tell me what is cro?
> 
> > look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs.
> 
> I already did this. There you can specify what files/packages to 
> remove..... my intention is to know every file that can be removed.

Well the .spec files for the minimal install cd gives you quite a few
clues.

You might also take a look at the build system for ipcop, it is built
using LFS coupled with its own make files. IIRC it includes in the build
system a list of files that will be installed on the target system. The
build system source code is only in the order of 1 MB I think (Naturally
it downloads a lot of other sources to actually build, but you don't
need to do that to look at the target file list.



> 
> Sascha.
> 

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 07:29:53 +1200
Nick Rout wrote:

> > 
> > I already did this. There you can specify what files/packages to 
> > remove..... my intention is to know every file that can be removed.
> 
> Well the .spec files for the minimal install cd gives you quite a few
> clues.

Specifically:

http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/src/releng/specs/2005.1/x86/livecd-stage2-minimal.spec?root=gentoo&rev=1.1&view=markup

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[W.Kenworthy]

I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from
memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this.  They
installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and
exercised it extensively.  They then did the remove everything based on
atime that hadnt been touched.

The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file
they had to put back. Testing after the initial delete was considerable.

>From my point of view, such a "stripped system" would always be
classified as unstable as you never know when it will ask for a file you
removed as it is just too complex to check every circumstance.

BillK


On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 23:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 12:01 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way:
> > 
> > 1) install everything you need
> > 2) note current system time
> > 3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo
> > 4) remount with noatime
> > 5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you
> >     note in 2)
> > 6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need
> >     them?
> > 
> > What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?
> 
> no
> 
> what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
> etc?
> 
> look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs.
> 
> > 
> > THX,
> > 
> > Sascha.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Air conditioned environment - do not open windows!
> 
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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Iain Buchanan]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 07:05 +0800, W.Kenworthy wrote:
> I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from
> memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this.  They
> installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and
> exercised it extensively.  They then did the remove everything based on
> atime that hadnt been touched.
> 
> The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file
> they had to put back. Testing after the initial delete was considerable.

yeah, that was probably me (earlier on in the year at least).  For the
initial install, I made the date somewhere around the epoch, or somehow
I altered every file on the filesystem to be this date (can't remember).
Then I fixed the date and booted the system.  I posted quite a few
questions and findings on the mailing list and ended up with that
option.  It works quite well in theory, however here are some notes to
help you:

1. symlinks aren't (or at least weren't in my case) picked up by the
process, probably because when you access a symlink, only the date of
the target appears to be altered.  I had to manually copy many symlinks
(which were mostly like /lib/libgcc_s.so -> libgcc_s.so.1) to even get
the system to boot.  And the error messages threw me way off.

2. The more you want the system to do, the harder it will be.  We didn't
want a whole host of features (no X), in fact only really ssh, ftpd,
iptables, and limited others.

3. don't delete everything you don't need, because you _will_ make a
mistake.  In fact, we redid the entire process a few times from scratch,
to refine it more.  To make it easier, make two partitions, or if your
final copy will only have one disk and one partition, put in a spare
disk just for the testing phase.  Make an exact copy on both before you
start deleting.  Then you can keep going back to the full installation
to get files you missed.  In fact, we made the machine dual boot to both
disks, just in case we wanted to test the full install versus our
minimal install.

4. write down the commands that you use to find and copy the files you
want, that way the second and third and subsequent times you do it, you
don't have to remember.


> >From my point of view, such a "stripped system" would always be
> classified as unstable as you never know when it will ask for a file you
> removed as it is just too complex to check every circumstance.

I did much of the initial work to prove the concept and handed it over
to someone else to turn into a reproducible system.  As far as I know,
we've had 3 or 4 running continuously for quite a few months now.

Our particular requirement was to make a running system for a 64 Mb
sandisk, with enough space left over for about 10-12 Mb of our own
software.  This is an embedded control system (no X), and we wanted a
very similar installation on our HMI (X, gnome, and other such boggy
apps :) running the same kernel so we could copy programs between them
if need be.  (The HMI runs a complete installation.)


If you're planning on doing it in a short amount of time, think again!
It won't be trivial, but the concept is at least possible.

HTH,
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 07:05:27 +0800
W.Kenworthy wrote:

> I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from
> memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this.  They
> installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and
> exercised it extensively.  They then did the remove everything based on
> atime that hadnt been touched.
> 
> The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file
> they had to put back.

This seems to be the essence of the problem: if you are trying to build
a router, reliability is the primary goal.

For that matter  it doesn't with the files that you may still have about, but which perhaps have no place on a router - ssh, maybe others.


>Testing after the initial delete was considerable.

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Sascha Lucas]

Hi Iain,

thanks a lot for your post (for the tips etc.).

> I did much of the initial work to prove the concept and handed it over
> to someone else to turn into a reproducible system.  As far as I know,
> we've had 3 or 4 running continuously for quite a few months now.

Do you have a website were you publish your concept?

> Our particular requirement was to make a running system for a 64 Mb
> sandisk, with enough space left over for about 10-12 Mb of our own
> software.  This is an embedded control system (no X), and we wanted a
> very similar installation on our HMI (X, gnome, and other such boggy
> apps :) running the same kernel so we could copy programs between them
> if need be.  (The HMI runs a complete installation.)

A System with X is also my intension.

> If you're planning on doing it in a short amount of time, think again!
> It won't be trivial, but the concept is at least possible.

I'm very lucky that you have no unresolvable problems (yet), so I'm 
looking forward. In the next few month I will start to work on this. 
Currently I'm thinking (thinking only, nothing is done) of using qemu for 
the "identification boot/run". It would be amazingly if a mechanism can be 
found, to dynamicaly bring in a file into an intial emtpy system.

THX,

Sascha.
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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Neil Bothwick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1831 bytes --]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:32:18 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:

> 1. symlinks aren't (or at least weren't in my case) picked up by the
> process, probably because when you access a symlink, only the date of
> the target appears to be altered.  I had to manually copy many symlinks
> (which were mostly like /lib/libgcc_s.so -> libgcc_s.so.1) to even get
> the system to boot.  And the error messages threw me way off.

You could use find to copy all symlinks, then use the "symlinks -d -r /"
to remove all those that point nowhere.

> 3. don't delete everything you don't need, because you _will_ make a
> mistake.  In fact, we redid the entire process a few times from scratch,
> to refine it more.  To make it easier, make two partitions, or if your
> final copy will only have one disk and one partition, put in a spare
> disk just for the testing phase.  Make an exact copy on both before you
> start deleting.  Then you can keep going back to the full installation
> to get files you missed.  In fact, we made the machine dual boot to both
> disks, just in case we wanted to test the full install versus our
> minimal install.

Or you could start with an empty partition and use find to copy newer
files instead of deleting the older ones. One way would be to direct the
output of "find -newer /reference/file" to a file and use this as the
--files-from argument to rsync. 

> 4. write down the commands that you use to find and copy the files you
> want, that way the second and third and subsequent times you do it, you
> don't have to remember.

Or use a script, then you don't have to worry about losing the piece of
paper :) I run several commands from one line scripts, because means I can
be sure of using the same options each time.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 23:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 12:01 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way:
> > 
> > 1) install everything you need
> > 2) note current system time
> > 3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo
> > 4) remount with noatime
> > 5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you
> >     note in 2)
> > 6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need
> >     them?
> > 
> > What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work?
> 
> no
> 
> what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs
> etc?
> 
> look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs.

Or.. create your own embedded gentoo. I'm doing it. Currently it's ~30
MB with kernel (very big kernel which have not stripped) and SSH and
dhcp.

-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Iain Buchanan]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 10:27 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
> Hi Iain,
> 
> thanks a lot for your post (for the tips etc.).

no worries

> Do you have a website were you publish your concept?

That would be nice wouldn't it?  Unfortunately, no, I never had time to
do that.

> A System with X is also my intension.

then you'll probably have more problems than I did.  I ran a very simple
installation.

Glad to be some help!
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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Sascha Lucas]

Hi Ian

>> Do you have a website were you publish your concept?
>
> That would be nice wouldn't it?  Unfortunately, no, I never had time to
> do that.

yes it would :-). I sucessfully have now an minimalistic system. Solving 
problems with "files not identified while root-FS mounted ro" (currently 
3) and some misc from baselayout (awk functions for depscan and 
env-update).

I plan to write some text in gentoo-wiki, if I find some time...

>> A System with X is also my intension.
>
> then you'll probably have more problems than I did.  I ran a very simple
> installation.

Hopefully not :-)... let's see in a few days/weeks.

THX,

Sascha.

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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Sascha Lucas]

Hi Neil,

> You could use find to copy all symlinks, then use the "symlinks -d -r /"
> to remove all those that point nowhere.
>
> Or you could start with an empty partition and use find to copy newer
> files instead of deleting the older ones. One way would be to direct the
> output of "find -newer /reference/file" to a file and use this as the
> --files-from argument to rsync.

I just want to say thank you for your tips. This 2 are realy usefull. I 
now have an minimalistic system.

Sascha.


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Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Iain Buchanan]

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 21:23 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote:
[snip]
>  I sucessfully have now an minimalistic system. Solving 
> problems with "files not identified while root-FS mounted ro" (currently 
> 3) and some misc from baselayout (awk functions for depscan and 
> env-update).
> 
> I plan to write some text in gentoo-wiki, if I find some time...
> 
> >> A System with X is also my intension.
> >
> > then you'll probably have more problems than I did.  I ran a very simple
> > installation.
> 
> Hopefully not :-)... let's see in a few days/weeks.

post back when you get to the next stage, I'd be interested in seeing
how you go.

thanks,
-- 
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