Linux without the GNU toolchain 5102

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:50:39 +0000, Unruh

I'll try to expand on the question, since your answer shows that it may not have been as clear as I wished.

Put it this way, there are several ways of viewing the question, but the ones that I was thinking of are:

VERSION A: To have a Linux kernel plus other stuff that will enable a system to boot up and arrive at a working shell prompt with a basic selection of tools, what are the elements of the toolchain that are ABSOLUTELY necessary?

VERSION B: Linux From Scratch uses a toolchain to build the kernel and its ancillaries plus bootloader, shell, basic binutils. Which parts of the toolchain are essential, and which could one do without (possibly at the cost of some inconvenience)?

I note that even using the GNU tools, one can build sub-10MB systems fitting the above description.

Oh, sure, if one wants to play audio afterwards then one needs audio tools &c. I'm not asking about that.

Agreed.

The question is unanswerable as you put it, but if you object to the question then please give me a fair chance (and make a reasonable effort to help me) to refine it so that it is answerable. Versions A and B should be answerable, not so?

Sarcasm aside, the question is a hypothetical one: I'm asking which tools would need to be rewritten, and on that basis it may be interesting to buttess how much work it would be to rewrite them.

It's a huge step from my asking a question out of intellectual curiosity to you buttuming that I am planning to actually sit down and start writing.

On the other hand, if Linus Torvalds had followed the same logic he would have said that it's way too much work to waste one's life engineering a

Because I'm a scientist, because I'm curious, and so I want to know, and because this is comp.os.linux.MISC, and the question fits very well in a miscellany of questions about Linux.

I believe it's likely that, say, scientist working on relativistic field theory would be able to understand that there are questions that are interesting in themselves. -- mark south: world citizen, net denizen