Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi

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2021-08-31 22:30:07

The Raspberry Pi is a clever little gadget, to be sure; but it suffers from the limitation that all the official Linux releases that are available for it (Raspian, NOOBS) are desktop-oriented. None is really intended for true embedded applications -- they are full-sized distributions with systemd, dbus, and all that stuff. Worse, they provide no straightforward method to run with a read-only root filesystem. Being able to shut down an embdedded Linux appliance safely simply by switching it off is a necessity, and running the root filesystem read-only is a way to help make this practicable.

The complexity of the standard distributions also makes the Pi slow to boot, not to mention slow to shut down if you want to avoid the hazards of a hard power-off.

To the best of my knowledge, and to my surprise, there is no official documentation even on the minimal requirements for a bootable Raspberry Pi boot SD card. I wouldn't expect the Raspberry Pi Foundation to provide guidance on building a Linux distribution but, in a device that is promoted as suitable for experimenters, I would have thought that they would release at least one truly minimal, base image that could be used for customization. To be fair, there are Pi Linux distributions derived from Raspbian that are less bloated than the official releases, like DietPi, but even these are far too heavy for a true embedded appliance.

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