buildroot VS gokrazy

I did it few times. It's so much easier nowadays with https://buildroot.org/

If you dig through the rootfs of the K1 it becomes clear that Creality is using buildroot so we should be able to do that ourselves - at least some of us.

An embedded system like Roku doesn't need to "run everything", it just needs to run their "platform", which is probably quite small. It's pretty trivial to assemble your own OS from "off-the-shelf" components. You can use something like buildroot to spin up a new OS in half a day, using only the components you want. You can also use "smaller" components that have far fewer features, meaning less bugs and less updates.

https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot

> I do this for every Windows installation that is used for similar purposes, like embedded machines that has to run a single application, virtual machines, etc.

Have you tried running Linux for these use cases? This sort of thing is an area Linux excels, in my experience.

When you run Windows, you're in for the whole kit and caboodle. Most of the components are proprietary, closed-source black boxes. You can only poke and prod and test and hope things don't break in unexpected ways.

Conversely, Linux can be easy stripped down to a bare bones kernel and a single statically-linked binary. I can run a useful application on top of Linux with the whole system weighing in smaller than bootmgfw.efi.

Something more complex, but still custom, is easily crafted with Buildroot.

https://buildroot.org/

Have a look at the commit history of Linux or buildroot for nice readable commit histories.

Gentoo could teach you more about what is involved in dependency handling and actual ‘construction’ of a Linux system. But Linux From Scratch is a much better teaching tool for learning this, and even things like Buildroot are arguably better than Gentoo for this because they generally force you to care about a lot of the stuff that Gentoo hides away to make the system nicer to use.

Switching to gokrazy[0] was the best thing I did for my Raspberry Pi uptimes. I think a lot of that is because it defaults to using read-only partitions so the common issue of SD cards falling over when you run apt upgrade no longer happens.

But I also think that gokrazy's simplicity and design helps it be just a solid, reliable foundation to build on top of.

[0]: https://gokrazy.org/

The idea there sounds a lot like https://gokrazy.org/, which builds a minimal go userland, wrapping one or more user provided go applications, and bundles in a linux kernel.

Targets mostly at single board computers, and I think it downloads pre-built kernels (and bootloaters if needed), rather than trying to build them directly, since getting a working cross compilation toolchain set up and plumbed into the kernel compilation process is still a pain.

I've personally only used yocto/open-embedded for that which does nicely handle building the cross-compilation toolchain, kernel image, and modules. But it is kinda overkill for that task, being designed to build a whole userland too.

reminds me of https://github.com/gokrazy/gokrazy which does similar things.

https://gokrazy.org/ would like a word

Fun! We have support for running on gokrazy (https://gokrazy.org/) already, and that's probably where Unikernel Linux is more applicable for us, for when people just want a "Tailscale appliance" image.

I'll email you.

gokrazy exists! https://github.com/gokrazy/gokrazy

https://github.com/gokrazy/gokrazy for one example