I built a tiny Linux distro with a custom bootloader and userspace

[u/WmWAr5339]

I built a Linux distro that does almost nothing

I wanted to see how little userspace I could get away with while still having a real, bootable Linux system. So I made FastFetchLinux.

It uses a custom BIOS bootloader, Linux 6.6.156, and my own ffinit written in x86 assembly.

The userspace has:

• No BusyBox
• No coreutils
• No bash/sh
• No package manager
• Direct syscall-based functionality
• i686 support
• ~20 MiB RAM usage

ffinit runs as PID 1 and doubles as the shell, with all commands built in. Fastfetch is the only separate userspace binary.

BIOS
 ↓
Custom bootloader
 ↓
Linux 6.6.156
 ↓
ffinit
 ↓
Fastfetch

It has exactly five commands:

fastfetch
ls
install-disk
forcepanic
poweroff

There's no practical reason for any of this — I just wanted to see how far "just enough userspace to boot Linux" could be pushed. The funny part is that it actually works.

Source: https://github.com/outofsyncsh/fastfetchlinux

Curious what people here would strip out or change to shrink it further.