stali - static linux statically linked only

stali (sta[tic] li[nux]) is a linux system based on a hand selected collection of the best tools for each task and each tool being statically linked (including some X clients such as xterm, surf, dwm, dmenu, mplayer).

It also targets binary size reduction through the avoidance of glibc and other bloated GNU libraries where possible (early experiments show that statically linked binaries are usually smaller than their dynamically linked glibc counterparts!!!). Note, this is pretty much contrary to what Ulrich Drepper reckons about static linking.

Due to the side-benefit that statically linked binaries start faster, the distribution also targets performance gains.

General system design

binary is primary focus, each executable is statically linked, potentially different executable format than ELF, since ELF is mainly designed to support dynamic linking
kernel is a single monolith based on linux, by default no kernel module support
system loader is lilo (maybe we will start maintaining it)
no initrd initially
perhaps later the whole system will be a ramdisk? will see (20h idea)
init system should be based on just one /etc/rc.{start,stop} script (look at p9 how they do it)

Basic filesystem design

Generally, /usr will be removed, what a useless directory, for non-base system stuff we might consider /local

/bin – all executables go here
/bin/kernel (linux kernel)
/dev – devices, check if we can avoid udev or what linux requires nowadays, the simplest approach would be best
/etc – system config/program config/user setup/network setup
/etc/rc.{start,stop} – init scripts
/home/root (root’s home)
/home/* – user home dirs
/include – include files
/lib – libraries, when used as devel box, only static libs, potentially
/local – possibly for software that’s not in the base
/mnt – mounts
/proc – linux crap
/share – man pages, locales and crap that several libraries ship
/sys – linux crap
/tmp – obvious
/var – spool, run, log, cache
/usr –> / (potentially softlink, will see if we can avoid this, mainly for broken packages)

Updating system is simply rsync'ing from distro server.

Typical end-user system

[anselm@x200s rootfs]$ tree
.
|-- bin
|-- dev
|-- etc
|-- home
|   `-- root
|-- mnt
|-- proc
|-- sys
|-- tmp
`-- var

Note: End-user systems have no /lib, /include, et cetera. They just have what is really necessary and nothing else.

Some related links

Bifrost/Linux – a minimalist Linux distro for USB media
$6M libc – Bionic is a nice library, though only usable for sane stuff
ldd arbitrary code execution – Nice exploit
static linking – My old blog entry
blog post about stali
On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization
musl libc