Small distribution for constructing container images.
There is no traditional package manager inside the target image. Instead, the software is built using a host build system.
This means that the resulting image can stay "minimalistic". While the build image contains all the tools needed to make it.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
buildroot/base latest b8817d0eaa5e 3 days ago 975MB
buildroot/root latest 9344bf52a6d5 3 days ago 1.46MB
The basic distro only consists of two components:
- uclibc (the system library)
- busybox (the system binaries)
There are input and output provided in two components:
- toolchain (the compiler sdk)
- rootfs (the root filesystem)
61M x86_64-buildroot-linux-uclibc_sdk-buildroot.tar.gz
756K x86_64-rootfs.tar.gz
61M aarch64-buildroot-linux-uclibc_sdk-buildroot.tar.gz
760K aarch64-rootfs.tar.gz
As usual with linux containers, the kernel is not included. There is also no need for a bootloader, in the system image.
There is an init system available, but normally not used.
It is being provided by busybox, and based on shell scripts.
A container image is provided by importing the rootfs archive:
FROM scratch
ADD rootfs.tar /
CMD ["/bin/sh"]The software packages to include are defined in a Makefile:
https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#adding-packages
There are host compilers for most of the available languages. Such as C/C++, Go, Python, and so on.
This includes support for their language package dependencies. Such as autotools, CMake, Go modules, etc.
Building all the required software is done using Buildroot.
The default container image, with Busybox, is around 1.5 MB.
See https://github.com/afbjorklund/buildroot4minimalism
Written by Anders F Björklund https://github.com/afbjorklund