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claylinux

Claylinux is a set of tools to build Linux bootable images using docker. It can produce raw disk images (.img), CDROM/ISO images (.iso), pure EFI binaries (.efi), ...

This project is currently a WORK IN PROGRESS, some breaking changes may happen at any time.

Getting Started

The Linux OS building process is the following:

  1. start from a base docker image which contains both the Linux OS filesystem and a Linux kernel. For example, you can use the claylinux/alpine-lts image which correspond to a Alpine Linux OS with a linux-lts kernel.
  2. add software & configuration files to the image using a Dockerfile.
  3. use the claylinux/builder image to generate a bootable image from the docker image you just built.

Here is an example of Dockerfile which builds a custom Alpine Linux image with nginx installed:

# Initialize the OS
FROM claylinux/alpine-lts:latest AS system
RUN apk add --no-cache nginx && rc-update add nginx default

# =========================================================
# Generate the OS image
FROM claylinux/builder:latest AS build
RUN --mount=from=system,target=/system build-image --format raw

# =========================================================
# Extract the files from the /out directory into a new image
FROM scratch AS output
COPY --from=build /out /

Build the OS image with this command:

docker buildx build --output=out .

A claylinux.img file is generated into the out/ directory, which is a bootable disk image. You can burn this image on a USB key or a hard drive using for example dd on Linux, or Rufus on Microsoft Windows. Then you can boot a machine on this media and use the Linux OS you built.

Tips

Since the OS image is built using docker, the /etc/hosts file is already used by docker to provide the networking to the build container, so it can't be used as the /etc/hosts file of the target OS. And it's the same for the /etc/resolv.conf file. So, if you want to change the /etc/hosts file in your target OS, please edit the /etc/hosts.target file, which will be used as /etc/hosts in the target OS.

Understanding how the OS works

There are a couple of things to know when using the claylinux tool (and some traps that you can fall into) which are detailed here:

  1. The whole operating system will be loaded into RAM and will run from there. So you should keep your image size minimal and avoid cluttering your OS filesystem, as it will eat up RAM.
  2. Due to point 1, no firmwares are added by default into the base images since they take much space. So, depending on the target machine you'll boot your OS on, you'll have to add some firmwares manually into your image. For Alpine Linux, the firmwares are found into the linux-firmware-* packages. You can easily identify which firmwares are missing by looking for the firmware load errors in the dmesg output. Note that no additional firmware is needed for virtual machine OSes using the virt kernels.
  3. If you need to add big files into your system, you'd better put them on a persistent filesystem that will be mounted in /etc/fstab instead of putting them into the OS image.
  4. Also, due to point 1, every change you make on the root filesystem will be lost after a reboot. If you need to persist some changes, add some mount points to persistent disks in /etc/fstab and use them.
  5. The kernel will start your operating system using a minimal init script. We don't use the Linux distribution's initramfs mechanisms (such as mkinitfs, mkinitramfs, dracut, ...) as they generally require the root filesystem to be located on a separated partition/disk. Instead, we bundle everything in a single .efi file.
  6. But thanks to 4 and 1, there's only one single .efi file to sign for Secure Boot, which contains both the kernel, the initramfs and the OS userland filesystem, and which can't be falsified. So it's pretty secure.

Development

To build the claylinux images, use:

docker buildx bake

And run some sanity tests with:

docker buildx bake test

Finally, you can build a test OS image & launch it in a qemu emulator using the following command:

docker compose run --rm emulator

Or, if you have kvm enabled on your docker host:

docker compose run --rm emulator-accel