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oasislinux / oasis

a small statically-linked linux system
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Bootable install without compiling the kernel? #125

Open xplshn opened 2 months ago

xplshn commented 2 months ago

Hi, I haven't been able to get Oasis to run, I'm stuck with a working rootfs, but unable to boot the kernel.

I have tried with Alpine's kernel, I also tried with mkroot's releases/snapshots: https://landley.net/toybox/downloads/binaries/mkroot/latest and with a Gentoo kernel binary release. I was unable to boot Oasis, I even tried using a rootfs with busybox shell, to check out what was failing, and I still couldn't figure it out.

It all fails at the start process of the kernel. (I did set init=/bin/sinit)

(NOTE: compiling the kernel is not an option for me, I need to use this laptop for school, it takes a day & a half to compile linux).

xplshn commented 2 months ago

Sorry for bothering you so much, its probably a skill issue of mine and not Oasis' wiki being vague.

LaithOsama commented 2 months ago

Dealing with comprehensive kernel prebuilt binaries that was intended for all users and use cases would be painful in this case due to the layers of complexity where you have to deal with modules, initramfs, and so on.

Also, trying to configure the kernel will require many attempts to reach a bootable state. But it's the least painful solution. I think you can use Github action workflow to compile the kernel, and it shouldn't be too difficult.

rnpnr commented 2 months ago

I have a couple hints but I won't be able to help troubleshooting:

(NOTE: compiling the kernel is not an option for me, I need to use this laptop for school, it takes a day & a half to compile linux).

If you can boot some generic working kernel you can do make localmodconfig to get a kernel config with only the modules you currently have loaded (and are therefore likely to need to boot and use your system). Building this will be significantly faster than building everything in the kernel.

Usually when the kernel fails to start though it will panic. Assuming you are doing a traditional setup with the kernel being stored in a different partition on your drive my guess is that you never mounted the root drive containing /bin/sinit.

xplshn commented 2 months ago

Thanks, will test when I get home if that was indeed the issue. I doubt it, because I set up the partitions using labels.

And I'll try to build the kernel as well.