[home]

Bloated with uclibc

Looking at the added file size of fuse.o (~32 KByte), fusermount (~19 KByte) and httpfs (~11 KByte) it may come to ones mind, that this assembles a handy tool for diskless computers even while booting.

But if you realy try to build a thin client, which boots via httpfs, you will soon realize, that beside fuse.o all parts have at least a reliance on the (dynamically linked) library C.

Obviously it's not sufficient to include the mentioned programs and a few startup scripts in the boot process.

Taking the second approach one gets


statically linked against uclibc (and compressed with upx)

That seems worth the effort:

It has to be mentioned, that we are indebted to the ingenious design of fuse. Only the kernel module depends for example on the compiler. But the other stuff can be build quite freely - even with an unusual library C.

Quick test

Boot from an ancient KNOPPIX-CD without fuse. As root enter:

	insmode fuse.o
	mknod /dev/fuse c 10 229
	chmod 666 /dev/fuse
(You can get fuse.o for kernel 2.4.27 from this page.)

As ordinary user do:

	PATH=$PATH:dir_of_fusermount
	httpfs http://some_host/some_iso local_empty_dir
You can mount the iso from local_empty_dir/some_iso as usual.

The binaries can be downloaded from this page. (Follow download link on top)

[home]