rootfs vs supermin

rootfs

Linux root file system builder in the spirit of buildroot (by dls-controls)

tool for creating supermin appliances (formerly called febootstrap). PLEASE DO NOT USE GITHUB FOR ISSUES OR PULL REQUESTS. See the website for how to file a bug or contact us. http://libguestfs.org (by libguestfs)

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rootfs		supermin
	Project
2	Mentions	2
2	Stars	161
-	Growth	1.2%
2.5	Activity	6.0
11 months ago	Latest Commit	4 months ago
Makefile	Language	OCaml
-	License	GNU General Public License v3.0 only

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rootfs

Posts with mentions or reviews of rootfs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-28.

What's the lightest Linux distro possible?
5 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 28 May 2022

Busybox + Linux. Examples are buildroot and PandABlocks-roots based on dls-rootfs. A minimal build can be around 1 or 2 MB, though if you want to go smaller you need to look at using ulibc instead of gnu libc.
RootFS Tooling
6 projects | /r/LinuxNotes | 14 Nov 2021

Root Filesystem Building Tool - Diamond Light Source

supermin

Posts with mentions or reviews of supermin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-22.

Nolibc: A minimal C-library replacement shipped with the kernel
4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2023

He briefly mentions dietlibc ("not evolving anymore") and ulibc. I think he'd be better off contributing to those projects.
FWIW I have built a program that needs a tiny initramfs[1] and we've found that dietlibc and musl worked really well in producing very tiny programs. Using glibc is terrible however - it links huge amounts of code into even the smallest program.
[1] https://github.com/libguestfs/supermin/blob/86fd6f3e86ab99d5...
RootFS Tooling
6 projects | /r/LinuxNotes | 14 Nov 2021

Supermin - libguestfs

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rootfs and supermin you can also consider the following projects:

linuxkit - A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers

infra-devops - Infra and DevOps Utils, like Kickstart to RootFS file builder in docker/podman environment, using AlmaLinux as foundation. This utility can be used in CI/CD pipeline to build docker RootFS files

sig-cloud-instance-images

libc - libc targeted for embedded systems usage. Reduced set of functionality (due to embedded nature). Chosen for portability and quick bringup.

PandABlocks-rootfs - Root filesystem build with tools for building zpg packages

cosmopolitan - build-once run-anywhere c library

kickstarts

printf - Tiny, fast, non-dependent and fully loaded printf implementation for embedded systems. Extensive test suite passing.