Supermin is a tool for building supermin appliances. These are tiny appliances [similar to virtual machines], usually around 100KB in size, which get fully instantiated on-the-fly in a fraction of a second when you need to boot one of them.
A complete description is in the supermin(1) man page.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR USERS OF SUPERMIN 4.x: supermin 5.x is a rewrite of supermin 4. It is compatible at a high level with supermin 4 / febootstrap 3, but requires some command line adjustments.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR USERS OF FEBOOTSTRAP 3.x: supermin 4.x is just an evolution of febootstrap 3.x (really we just renamed it). The previous febootstrap program is now called supermin. The previous febootstrap-supermin-helper program is now called supermin-helper. Apart from that they are identical, although they will evolve and add features over time.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR USERS OF FEBOOTSTRAP 2.x: febootstrap 3.x is a complete rewrite. febootstrap 2.x could only build Fedora distributions. This version can build many varieties of Linux distros. 3.x only builds supermin appliances, it does not build chroots. 3.x does not build cross-distro, cross-release or cross-architecture systems. If you want febootstrap 2.x, please use the 'febootstrap-2.x' branch from the git repository.
ocaml
ocaml findlib ("ocamlfind" program)
perldoc
This is just used to generate the manpage.
static libc
Can be replaced with dietlibc, musl-libc (and maybe other alternate libc). See section ``Alternate libc'' below.
bash
gcc
gawk
libcom_err libext2fs /sbin/mke2fs
For Fedora/RHEL:
rpm librpm yumdownloader (from yum-utils) or 'dnf download' plugin
NB: On RHEL, use yum-builddep supermin' to install all the dependencies. On Fedora usednf builddep supermin'.
For Debian/Ubuntu:
dpkg apt-get
NB: On Debian, use `apt-get build-dep supermin' to install all the dependencies.
For openSUSE:
rpm librpm zypper
For Mageia:
rpm librpm urpmi & fakeroot, or 'dnf download' plugin
For Arch Linux:
pacman fakeroot makepkg
These are only needed if you plan to boot the supermin appliances you are building:
qemu >= 0.13 kernel >= 2.6.36
zcat (command) - if your kernel uses gzipped modules
xzcat (command) - if your kernel uses xz-compressed modules
zstdcat (command) - if your kernel uses zstd-compressed modules
If you're cloning this from git the first time, do:
autoreconf -i
For normal builds, and building from the tarball:
./configure make
You can run supermin without installing:
./src/supermin --help
To install the software:
sudo make install
make check
Note that the tests require a network connection. If you don't have a network connection (eg. for distro package building) then try doing:
./configure --disable-network-tests
See the examples/ subdirectory.
Send feedback to guestfs@lists.libguestfs.org. You can file bugs in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ (under "Fedora", "supermin")
Supermin uses a small, statically linked "init" binary. Normally this is linked to static glibc, but static glibc produces enormous binaries (800KB+). You can use an alternate libc if you prefer. For example, using dietlibc, I can build a 22K init, about 1/40th of the size.
$ ls -l init/init -rwxrwxr-x. 1 rjones rjones 21736 Feb 17 14:03 init/init
For dietlibc, build supermin like this:
./configure make clean make -C init CC="diet gcc" make
which builds the init using dietlibc, and then builds the rest of supermin with the dietlibc-using init binary.
For musl, build supermin like this:
./configure make clean make -C init CC="musl-gcc" make