[elbe-devel] Historical (2012-12-11): Draft ELBE Article

[John Ogness]

On 2024-03-12, John Ogness <john.ogness at linutronix.de> wrote:
> This is a HISTORICAL DOCUMENT posted to this mailing list in 2012.

I should also mention the context that motivated the repost. It came
from a set of comments within a github pull request [0]. I include them
here so they are archived in this mailing list as well.

-----------------------

On 2024-03-12, John Ogness <notifications at github.com> wrote:
> On 2024-03-12, Thomas Weißschuh <notifications at github.com> wrote:
>> FYI it is a general goal of me to simplify the initvm (and maybe also
>> remove it somehow) Running in containers is also a general goal.

Note that ELBE originally did not use a virtual machine. This change was
in 2012 (unfortunately pre-github and pre-mailing list). The project
started in 2009. The main reasons why the ELBE team decided to change
the build environment to be in a virtual machine:

 - Minimizing dependencies so that ELBE can run on different Linux
   distributions and operating systems (even native Windows is
   supported).

 - Having full control over dependencies so that ELBE can build reliably
   on any host system.

 - Running foreign-arch software requires binfmt support.

 - Avoid pulling in build host details from /proc /sys /dev.

 - Use root for many tasks without risks to host.

Perhaps some of these requirements have changed in the last decade. The
available technologies certainly have changed. I just wanted to point
out these reasons because they tend to get lost when a project switches
maintainers a few times.

BTW, I still have many interesting emails about ELBE design requirements
that were posted to the elbe-devel mailing list (before the list was
archiving). It may be of use to look them over to avoid repeating the
same mistakes we made 15 years ago. It may also be of value to create
some sort of manifesto so that the goals/requirements are not lost 10
years from now.

[0] https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/pull/402