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.

• One approach in this situation is to simply add the needed libraries (several MBytes) as HTTP-FUSE-KNOPPIX does.
• Another approach is static linking as it was done for ntfs-3g in Puppy. Because you are adding the same code for every damned program this makes generally things worse although only needed parts of the particular library is added to any single program.

statically linked against uclibc (and compressed with upx)

• install uclibc
• compile fuse against uclibc, which yields smaller programs
  • fuse (2.5.3) is ready to be compiled against uclibc (./configure; make; sudo make install works).
  • missing kernel headers let the compiler complain, but you don't want the kernel module anyway
  • install at least the libraries and headers
  • if you don't already have static fusermount, build it now
• statically compile httpfs against uclibc and the just build fuse library
• compress with upx, if you like

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

As ordinary user do:

	PATH=$PATH:dir_of_fusermount
	httpfs http://some_host/some_iso local_empty_dir

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