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The PortaLinux Project

The PortaLinux Project is a collection of utilities, libraries and build scripts created with the purpose of making embedded Linux distributions with GUI and TUI capabilities that take up at most 10MiB of storage and 64MiB of RAM. The PortaLinux Project consist of six separate subprojects: the PortaLinux Runtime (pl-rt), the PortaLinux Core Utilities (pl-coreutils), the PortaLinux Terminal Library (pltermlib), the PortaLinux Toolkit (pltk), the PortaLinux Init System/Service Supervisor (pl-srv), and the PortaLinux Ports System/Build System (the portalinux repo itself).

While PortaLinux is mainly made for embedded applications, it's versatile enough to be used in a lot more than just embedded applications. PortaLinux can be used for containers, recovery partitions, rescue media, suckless Linux installs, initramfs replacements, and more.

PortaLinux's root filesystem is built and packaged as a Linux initramfs archive (gzipped cpio archive). This means that it can be booted by any precompiled Linux kernel that supports booting an external initramfs via the initrd parameter. This does mean that there is no such thing as a PortaLinux kernel, and you will have to either provide your own prebuilt kernel or build your own using the build system.

Contributors

Here are our current list of contributors, and their contributions to the project:

• CinnamonWolfy (Founder) - pl-rt, pl-srv, pltermlib, pltk, pl-coreutils, Ports/Build System
• (Name witheld at request) (Project Member) - LLVM Support, Build System refactoring
• mothcompute (One-off Contributor) - Some utilities within pl-coreutils
• quduell (One-off Contributor) - Helped with website redesign