Overview

TayOS is a set of scripts to build a very basic busybox operating system. It was intended for me to learn more about Linux build tools and the process of building real embedded Linux distributions like Yocto and Alpine.

Getting started

For a breakdown of every step, visit the blog post I wrote.

Environment

# Starts a Alpine build environment and fetches our sources
./build-in-docker.sh

You may need to prepend sudo to start the Docker container. The subsequent scripts should be run inside our build environment.

Kernel

# Configure and build the kernel sources
./00-kernel.sh

Busybox

# Configure and build Busybox
./01-busybox.sh

Initial Root Filesystem

Take a look inside rootfs/. In there is the initalization script init that is started after the kernel loads the initial root filesystem into memory. This script sets up the required virtual filesystems for a working Linux system (like /dev, /proc) and then starts the real PID 0 init daemon.

# Copies busybox and rootfs/ into a initramfs image
./30-initramfs.sh

Testing

If you have QEMU installed, you can test the image outside of the Docker container.

./test-in-qemu.sh

You may need to prepend sudo.