Reducing the root filesystem image size

By default, the core-image-minimal size for the wandboard-quad unpacked tarball is around 45 MB, and core-image-sato is around 150 MB. This recipe will explore methods to reduce their size.

How to do it...

An example of a small image, core-image-small, that does not include the packagegroup-core-boot recipe and can be used as the base for a root filesystem image with reduced size, recipes-core/images/core-image-small.bb, is shown next:

DESCRIPTION = "Minimal console image."

IMAGE_INSTALL= "\
        base-files \
        base-passwd \
        busybox \
        sysvinit \
        initscripts \
        ${ROOTFS_PKGMANAGE_BOOTSTRAP} \
        ${CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL} \
"

IMAGE_LINGUAS = " "

LICENSE = "MIT"

inherit core-image

IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE ?= "8192"

This recipe produces an image of about 6.4 MB. You can go even smaller if you use the poky-tiny distribution by adding the following to your conf/local.conf file:

DISTRO = "poky-tiny"

The poky-tiny distribution...