Hi All,

The current project that I am working on will be a small footprint RAM 
based system based upon Alpine Xen and will generally boot from a either 
a small sized ISO or PXE booting.

As this system will be meant to run on many different desktop systems, I 
am wondering if there is any type of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so 
that upon booting the system can be analyzed quickly and any needed 
drivers could be loaded and persisted for subsequent boots.  This all 
comes from the concerns in that some systems are desktops with wireless 
adapters or some particular graphics cards, for examples, that might be 
needed.

I was thinking about how it might be best to try to be able to provide 
those drives while at the same time keeping the total footprint and 
ultra-lightweight as possible which is a key goal in this effort.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Lonnie

For drivers: Linux's built in hardware probing is already pretty good at this,
You could build custom kernels for your devices but IME there's not a ton of
performance to be gained doing that. Maybe if you shrink the kernel down you
might save a few seconds loading/decompressing it. I suppose if you're *very*
short on RAM this could be a big deal. You can see which drivers you're
actually using by booting a generic kernel on your hardware and checking the
symlinks in sysfs.

For firmware (which is probably what you were thinking about W.R.T. wireless):
Alpine's firmware package is pretty large last I checked. If you know what
hardware you have ahead of time you could build your own pruned version to
replace it. You can also statically link this into the kernel (although
distributing that might be legally complicated) if you're building your own.

I used to build custom kernels for odd hardware as part of a consulting service
I ran. If you'd like me to take a closer look feel free to send me an email
with more details.


--Stephen

On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 05:19:38PM -0500, Dr. Lonnie Cumberland, PhD wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> The current project that I am working on will be a small footprint RAM based
> system based upon Alpine Xen and will generally boot from a either a small
> sized ISO or PXE booting.
> 
> As this system will be meant to run on many different desktop systems, I am
> wondering if there is any type of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so that
> upon booting the system can be analyzed quickly and any needed drivers could
> be loaded and persisted for subsequent boots.  This all comes from the
> concerns in that some systems are desktops with wireless adapters or some
> particular graphics cards, for examples, that might be needed.
> 
> I was thinking about how it might be best to try to be able to provide those
> drives while at the same time keeping the total footprint and
> ultra-lightweight as possible which is a key goal in this effort.
> 
> Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Lonnie
> 

On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 11:33 PM Stephen Wiley <swiley@swiley.net> wrote:
>
> For drivers: Linux's built in hardware probing is already pretty good at this,
> You could build custom kernels for your devices but IME there's not a ton of
> performance to be gained doing that. Maybe if you shrink the kernel down you
> might save a few seconds loading/decompressing it. I suppose if you're *very*
> short on RAM this could be a big deal. You can see which drivers you're
> actually using by booting a generic kernel on your hardware and checking the
> symlinks in sysfs.
>
> For firmware (which is probably what you were thinking about W.R.T. wireless):
> Alpine's firmware package is pretty large last I checked. If you know what
> hardware you have ahead of time you could build your own pruned version to
> replace it. You can also statically link this into the kernel (although
> distributing that might be legally complicated) if you're building your own.
>
> I used to build custom kernels for odd hardware as part of a consulting service
> I ran. If you'd like me to take a closer look feel free to send me an email
> with more details.
>
>
> --Stephen
>
> On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 05:19:38PM -0500, Dr. Lonnie Cumberland, PhD wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > The current project that I am working on will be a small footprint RAM based
> > system based upon Alpine Xen and will generally boot from a either a small
> > sized ISO or PXE booting.
> >
> > As this system will be meant to run on many different desktop systems, I am
> > wondering if there is any type of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so that
> > upon booting the system can be analyzed quickly and any needed drivers could
> > be loaded and persisted for subsequent boots.  This all comes from the
> > concerns in that some systems are desktops with wireless adapters or some
> > particular graphics cards, for examples, that might be needed.
> >
> > I was thinking about how it might be best to try to be able to provide those
> > drives while at the same time keeping the total footprint and
> > ultra-lightweight as possible which is a key goal in this effort.
> >
> > Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Lonnie
> >
>

Note that by default, all firmware packages are installed, but if you
explicitly install just
some of them, the rest will not be installed (or removed). That means
if you know what
firmware you need, you can reduce the amount of storage required significantly.