fosslinux / live-bootstrap

Use of a Linux initramfs to fully automate the bootstrapping process
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Reduce srcfs / bare-metal image size to no more than 256MiB #346

Open Googulator opened 8 months ago

Googulator commented 8 months ago

For the Trusted Flash drive project, I have been researching various ways to build some kind of Flash storage (USB, SPI, etc.) that can be verifiably limited to 512 byte capacity at boot, and then fully unlocked later once correct loading of the boot sector (builder-hex0 stage 1) has been verified - all without having to trust some firmware to do the limiting and unlocking.

Some ways to achieve this would be:

Unfortunately, these techniques all seem to top out at about 256MiB - e.g. 256MiB SPI flash storage is available today, but not 512MiB.

The simplify branch has already achieved a reduction to about 290MiB, so 256MiB seems within reach. Maintaining that goal together with #345 seems rather more difficult, but IMO still doable.

Googulator commented 8 months ago

A helpful resource for this is https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/rocklinux/ROCK-2.1/ - a large repository of BZ2-compressed source downloads, including for software that's only available as GZ elsewhere, such as bash-2.05b.

Googulator commented 7 months ago

436 achieves this, but the space left over is not enough for a "trivial" version of #345 to be also included in the 256MiB target.