Named in memory of our cat Mimi (1/1/2022-5/13/2025). Bootstrapping a from-scratch Linux-based OS with complete toolchain and runtime (musl libc, gcc, chrony, runit), manually packaging 30+ core utilities (busybox, openssl, perl) into a <600 MB bootable image, supporting x86_64 and aarch64.
Mimux aims to be up-to-date with its core packages as possible. Packages are kept up-to-date with the latest stable release; rc's, alpha's, and beta's will not be accepted. Statuses are publicly available at mxm.mit.junic.kim
Development is standardized around the Alpine Linux Docker image defined in the Dockerfile. For further documentation on the Mimux build process, check out the README's at tools or core.
I cannot believe I chose to undertake this project, but it's been quite instructional and fun so far.
After two months of suffering, I also have personal beef against the perl build system asdlfjas;lkdfjals;df (Also imagine goofy ahhh APFS not distinguishing upper and lower case files names)
All provided images here consist of a 2GB rootfs.
x86_64:
aarch64:
The docker container is the only officially supported development environment bc of tightly controlled dependencies and environment variables.
To launch into a dev shell, run docker-compose up -d && ./tools/dev.sh.
If you insist on a local environment (note COMPLETELY unsupported), install the
dependencies listed in ./Dockerfile and then run
eval "$(./tools/env.sh)"If a build script uses some random environment variable, it is almost
certainly defined in ./tools/env.sh.
Execute the ./buildall.sh with no arguments inside the dev container.
All final build artifacts will be located in ./dist/.
On an M4 Pro Mac running Orbstack, this should take around 10 minutes to complete. The GitHub CI takes around an hour to build each image.
The kernel has been maximally stripped and has no module support. There is no intention to support bare metal hardware.
If you're on Apple Silicon with Homebrew, congrats. Just run
./tools/macos_boot.sh; this should immediately boot up a working vm given you
installed qemu and efi firmware in the standard homebrew way.
Otherwise, the setup is a big clunky, but here are some pointers for configuring with something like Virt-manager, UTM, etc.
- The bootable image is located in
./dist/bootable.img - Select the options that allow you to directly import a disk
- YOU MUST USE UEFI!! This may be slightly tricky, but make sure you have vm firmware installed for this. This is enforced because I want a consistent boot environment across all cpu architectures.
The default configured bootloader will supply you with three boot modes:
- Mimux $kernel - Normal booting, normal init runs and you get dropped into a getty session
- Mimux $kernel (logs) - Same as above, except that kernel and init logs will be visible in the same tty where you log in.
- Mimux $kernel (debug shell) - You get dropped into an initramfs shell.
The default user is mimi and the password is george (his favorite chipmunk).
Root login is disabled by default; you can perform root commands via doas.
Mimux uses musl, busybox, and runit (init scripts shamelessly ripped from void) to reduce bloat. However, the intention is that there are sufficiently many build tools that theoretically you can build most things from source.
The default timezone is US Eastern Time. To change, run
ln -sfn /usr/share/zoneinfo/{whatever} /etc/localtimelike you would for any other barebones distro.
To ensure that packages with supported version checking are all up-to-date, you
should run the ./tools/versions.py script. This script gets automatically run
by the CI on each commit as well.
Since build scripts may be incompatible across different package versions/require tweaking to run, actual package bumps will be done manually.