Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps
A bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch — for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes — not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process. Now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all.
The live-bootstrap project was started in 2020 by Samuel Tyler (also known as "fosslinux") as a way to automate a complete bootstrap of a modern Linux system. Since then, Tyler has been joined by Andrius Štikonas and Gábor Stefanik as co-maintainers, along with 17 other contributors. The project's goal is to create a usable system ""with only human-auditable, and wherever possible, human-written, source code"". The project pulls in a number of other pieces of software, from bootstrapping tools like stage0-posix and GNU Mes, to historical versions of software that are necessary to build their more modern counterparts, such as GCC version 4.0.4 (the most recent version that does not require a C++ compiler to build). The whole process of bootstrapping a system is automated, making it possible to run automatic tests as new steps are added or software is updated.