Linux Really from Scratch: Part 1

Linux from Scratch has been one of the projects that I’ve always been interested in…and never gotten around to actually going through with it! I think I downloaded the book a few years ago and actually read a couple of chapters, but never went past that.

So for one reason or another, during the last few days I’ve been looking at how Linux is actually booted and how the user space is launched, and I thought maybe I can do it all by myself. Without even going through the LFS book.

So in this, hopefully, series of articles, I’m going to document the process of building a very basic Linux system, all the pieces built from scratch. This will be an iterative process in which we do things step-by-step, in each step adding a bit more complexity.

This is what I’m trying to achieve with this series:

• We’ll take a look at how Linux actually boots.

• We’ll see the building blocks of the user space.

• We’ll try to see what it is the distros do for us. Hopefully we’re going to get a lot more respect for the folks who do all that hard work for us!

• I’ll try to keep everything deterministic and repeatable.

• My main focus will be creating an image that is run in a VM and accessed with SSH. So no graphics, at least, not for some time. SSH will also take a while to arrive, but I’ll try to get there as soon as possible, since I really hate working in a console without a proper terminal.

Where to begin?

We will start with two pieces: the Linux kernel and a tiny init program. This will be our init:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    printf("Hello, World!\n");
    printf("This is your friendly init system.\n");
    printf("Just hanging here...\n");
    for (;;);

    return 0;
}

This will simply print out a message and then loop indefinitely, since an init is not supposed to ever exit. We will need to compile this statically. We don’t have glibc or other dynamic libraries right now. Compile the program by running:

gcc hello.c -static -o hello
strip hello

The resulting executable, hello, will be our primitive init.

Then we need to build the kernel. Get the source code for the stable branch of the kernel:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git

The latest stable version is v4.19.8 right now. Checkout that version:

git checkout v4.19.8

I decided to simply use the config for current Ubuntu 18.04 kernel as the basis. (Thinking about repeatability? You’re right. More on that later.)

Configure and build the kernel:

cd linux
cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) ./.config
make oldconfig
make

Running what we have

We’re going to use qemu to run what we have. But first, let’s create the root image.

Create an image file and mount it:

qemu-img create image.img 2G
sudo mount image.img /mnt

Now copy the hello executable to the mount directory and rename it to init. Then unmount.

cp hello /mnt/init
sudo umount /mnt

All right. We’re all set. Launch it all by running:

qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel /path/to/bzImage \
                   -append "root=/dev/sda init=/init console=ttyS0" \
                   -hda /path/to/image.img \
                   -enable-kvm \
                   -nographic \
                   -serial mon:stdio

You need to fix the path to the kernel and the disk image. The kernel should be in the arch/x86_64/boot directory after the build is complete.

If everything is okay, you’ll see the boot messages and at the end you’ll get the “Hello, World!” message from our “init system.”

What’s in this command?

• -kernel /path/to/bzImage: specifies the kernel image to use. Using this option, we won’t have to create a bootable disk, we just directly provide the kernel to boot.

• -append "root=/dev/sda init=/init console=ttyS0": adds a few options to the kernel command-line. root is the root file-system that is mounted on /, init is the path to the init program to use, and console specifies the output console device (needed in combination with the -serial option).

• -enable-kvm: use KVM for virtualization.

• -nographic: do not show the SDL window that is used as VM display by default.

• -serial mon:stdio: redirect the serial port to stdio. This, in combination with the console parameter passed to the kernel, causes kernel output to be displayed on the current terminal.

It’s just the beginning

I had actually prepared a lot more material, especially about repeatability and build automation, but since the article was getting too long, I’ll leave those for another article. Stay tuned.