Devs on Acid - 10 years Sabotage Linux - The history of the first musl-based distro

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2021-06-28 08:30:02

On Monday, 5th April 2021, Sabotage Linux had its 10 years anniversary since its first commit by Christian Neukirchen aka chris2, nowadays known as Leah Neukirchen.

The build procedure consisted of building a stage0 rootfs, containing a musl targeting C compiler toolchain and a stripped down busybox binary that was barely sufficient to make it possible to chroot into the rootfs and build the rest of the packages without leaks from the host environment. GCC 3.4.6 was chosen as the stage0 compiler because it doesn't require 3rd party libraries like mpc, mpfr, gmp (these were added as a hard dependency to gcc >= 4.3), and because it is much slimmer than GCC 4+ and therefore faster to build.

Once inside the rootfs, GCC 4.5.2 was built (because the linux kernel required extensions only available in recent gccs), GNU m4 (required as a prerequisite for almost every package using GNU autotools), and GNU awk/sed because the sed and awk offered by busybox were too buggy or didn't support extensions used by other package build scripts. Perl was built because the kernel build system required to execute some perl scripts. Also busybox got built a second time with a bigger set of applets.

Everything was built with a set of shell scripts, and there wasn't even an init system yet, so sabotage could only be used inside the chrooted rootfs.