Building a tiny Linux from scratch (2025)

Building a tiny Linux from scratch 2025-01-21 / blinry / CC BY-SA 4.0 / tech Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop! Here’s what it looked like: Let me tell you how I got there. I wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal to cobble together the bare neccessities required to boot into a working shell. In the end, I had a tiny Linux system with a size of 2.5 MB, which I could boot from a USB stick on my laptop! What you’ll get out of this article: A better understanding of what happens when your computer boots Linux. What terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean. Ideas for how to deal with the problems that I encountered.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Blinry.