Hi
I often play around with fringe operating systems but always fall back to Linux due to its amazing hardware support. I just got to think about a distro idea that I wonder if it already exist:
A minimal linux distro that basically acts as a "bootloader" / KVM host. Ideally all the VM machine operations could be operated from the bootloader (syslinux) menu. During install it would basically just make two main partitions: A small boot partition containing the distro itself (in a file format accessible by most OSes .. perhaps vfat even) and another partition for the bootable disk images. The advantage with this would be to "abstract" the hardware in such a way that one could run just about any OS with the great hardware support of Linux.
Some components:
- Kernel: Linux (in its distributed condition, as many drivers enabled as possible)
- bootloader: Syslinux
- LibC: musl or uclibc
- userland: toybox or busybox
- virtualization: Qemu or linux-kvm (can this one boot anything else than linux?)
- anything else? Is X or directfb needed for graphics?
The distro would not have to be self-hosting (self-compiling) or have any packages by itself. An aim would however be to have it "guest-hosted" (that is, the minimal virtualization host distro should be possible to recompile and update from inside a guest OS that can run a build environment able to build its components (Linux, *BSD, Illumos, ...))
I often play around with fringe operating systems but always fall back to Linux due to its amazing hardware support. I just got to think about a distro idea that I wonder if it already exist:
A minimal linux distro that basically acts as a "bootloader" / KVM host. Ideally all the VM machine operations could be operated from the bootloader (syslinux) menu. During install it would basically just make two main partitions: A small boot partition containing the distro itself (in a file format accessible by most OSes .. perhaps vfat even) and another partition for the bootable disk images. The advantage with this would be to "abstract" the hardware in such a way that one could run just about any OS with the great hardware support of Linux.
Some components:
- Kernel: Linux (in its distributed condition, as many drivers enabled as possible)
- bootloader: Syslinux
- LibC: musl or uclibc
- userland: toybox or busybox
- virtualization: Qemu or linux-kvm (can this one boot anything else than linux?)
- anything else? Is X or directfb needed for graphics?
The distro would not have to be self-hosting (self-compiling) or have any packages by itself. An aim would however be to have it "guest-hosted" (that is, the minimal virtualization host distro should be possible to recompile and update from inside a guest OS that can run a build environment able to build its components (Linux, *BSD, Illumos, ...))
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