minideb VS pi-gen

postgres:15-bullseye 2bb008a38e7c 379MB

[1] https://github.com/bitnami/minideb

However, it is sometimes a good idea to benchmark the speed of different images, as sometimes a significant speed loss is possible.

as is stated initially, that goes back to how bitnami is building its Docker images, basing on a set of debian packages (minideb) - there's also a shell library/framework embedded that does useful things, but that makes you read more code when you go check how the sausage is made. That minideb is the basis for the higher CVE count compared to scratch or alpine images.

> it’s a well-kept secret that no one wants to talk about

the maintainer side most casual docker image users aren't aware of I'd rephrase, but bitnami at least documents the issue

https://github.com/bitnami/minideb#security

https://docs.bitnami.com/kubernetes/open-cve-policy/

Ah, yeah it's a little more confusing because it's using the debootstrap tool (https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap) to build the container image filesystem. You can see all the gory logic here: https://github.com/bitnami/minideb/blob/master/buildone and https://github.com/bitnami/minideb/blob/master/mkimage It's a bunch of shell scripting that's not really meant to be interpreted by anyone that isn't a debian expert though, so don't feel bad if it looks really confusing. I think the overall thing is that minideb installs the absolute bare minimum system with debootstrap and even strips out a few essential packages like trusted SSL CAs, etc. If you need anything (including those essential packages) you're meant to just install_packages install them--it's all using the same apt sources and packages as debian.

Do you know why this is? Because it's part of the base file system. Here is a line from the build script for minideb (basically the smallest image needed to run a container): https://github.com/bitnami/minideb/blob/e4f37e8a5d271d93b79c3f4caa49c4ceb95d8eec/mkimage#L52

Not to mention that if you really want to tinker you can use pi-gen to customise builds from a desktop without all that much difficulty:

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Worth a play.

If you want a comprehensive answer then you can look at https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen and see what packages are installed in stage4 and stage5.

You can use the tool that the Pi foundation uses to generate their images: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Re: a preconfigured SD with RaspAP, this is possible with pi-gen, the tool used to create the official RPi OS images, but the build process can be a bit involved.

pi@raspmountain:~/webcam $ which startx /usr/bin/startx pi@raspmountain:~/webcam $ cat /boot/issue.txt Raspberry Pi reference 2021-01-11 Generated using pi-gen, https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen, 21090519d85bdaa1615d5d5057d37b09368ea5d2, stage4

I've been using pi-gen to build images. Does buildroot have any advantages over that?

The OS images are generated using pi-gen. https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/blob/master/stage5/00-install-extras/00-packages + Libreoffice is the list of additional packages in the recommended software image.All the other packages get pulled in as a dependency.

You can always create your own raspbian image using Pi-Gen. I’ve been looking into doing it for a couple projects already.