On 14.05.2026 18:05, Benjamin Drung wrote:
On Thu, 2026-05-14 at 11:24 +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
08.05.2026 12:23, Benjamin Drung wrote:
Package: busybox
Version: 1:1.37.0-10.1
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]
Dear Maintainer,
please provide a busybox build specificly to be used in initrds like
initramfs-tools and dracut. If you are open to the idea, I can come up
with the list of applets to build and a patch for it.
What's missing in the regular busybox build for this purpose for you?
It's the opposite. The busybox binary provides more applets that are
needed for the initrd use case. Ubuntu has currently a patch for busybox
to build an specific binary for initramfs-tools which is much smaller:
If your concern is the size, I'd suggest you to address two (two!)
libcs in initrd. The main system uses one libc (glibc), while initrd,
which is supposed to be small, contains two - glibc and klibc. Yes,
klibc is much smaller, but all functionaity of it is already provided
by glibc.
But the size of busybox + glibc is a tiny fraction of debian's initrd.
The main size comes from modules and firmware. These are significantly
larger than busybox.
For comparison, here's my initrd, with busybox but not klibc:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11332740 May 8 10:57 initrd.img-6.19.14+deb13-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11374110 May 11 09:06 initrd.img-7.0.4+deb13-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13891520 May 1 10:59 vmlinuz-6.19.14+deb13-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14018496 May 8 15:54 vmlinuz-7.0.4+deb13-amd64
it is smaller than vmlinuz. And it provides all functionality which
is needed for rescue purposes - if a system does not boot, this initrd
has everything needed to make it bootable again.
The same initrd built by initramfs-tools is about 90Mb.
I disagree we need smaller busybox for initrd. That'll be reduced
functionality which *is* needed, and it will give us nothing.
Thanks,
/mjt
