MYmyaccountonhn·Sep 15, 2026
Setting up Oasis <https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis> taught me more than LFS personally. Everything being statically compiled makes it less magic.
In Linux from Scratchoasislinux
oasis
Roff2020–2026
oasislinux / oasis
oasis
a small statically-linked linux system
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18Mentions
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a small statically-linked linux system
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
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Observed mentions: 2020-06-04 20:57:51 UTC to 2026-09-15 06:49:08 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
18 sourceshttps://github.com/oasislinux/oasis is also a a small statically-linked linux system using musl and the like. Curious about your thoughts on that?
In Suckless.org: software that sucks lessSee https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis for a proof of concept.
No dynamic linking locks you out of Clang+LLVM (mostly: static clang isn't an officially supported configuration, but it can probably be forced to exist. I haven't properly looked into it yet.), Firefox, Chromium, QtWebEngine, (so no alt browsers, either), and probably a lot more. Statically linking every single package out there requires a lot of patches to build systems to get them to properly do it. Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance if you have a nonstandard desired result, such as fully static builds.
In Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre operating systemhttps://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
It's not perfect, but it's clean and moves in this lua direction.
In Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)Oasis is one: https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
In The state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared object librariesOasis – a small, statically-linked Linux system
531 points · Open discussionOasis: Small statically-linked Linux system
381 points · Open discussionNot a big issue for someone who maintains his own Linux version, https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis.
In Samurai: Ninja-compatible build tool written in CThe code is readable and maintainable, and can be used in the Linux distro that the author maintains without pulling in a huge number of dependencies to build a C++ compiler.
https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
https://sr.ht/~mcf/cproc/
In Samurai: Ninja-compatible build tool written in CIf you're into very small linux desktops- I've had a lot of fun with Oasis: https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
The full desktop image is 77mb
In Tiny Core Linux 13.0 is a full Linux desktop in 22 MBOh dear, you definitely chose the wrong person to accuse of not auditing their code.
I'm typing this from my OpenBSD laptop, which, I assure you, I have audited extensively; but that's hardly relevant to this topic.. I just think it's funny that you would assume this of me. I'm also big on system-transparency[0] and micro systems like Oasis Linux[1] which attempt to limit things being able to hide.
Granted, nothing is perfectly secure.
But, again, besides the point entirely.
Your central thesis is that nothing is safe.
Why, then, should I not just use telegram? Or VK, or WeChat?
We have consensus in the HN community that those chat systems (especially telegram) are inherently insecure. Why?
Don't worry, I'll answer for you: Because they do not support E2EE except when specifically asked to, and because they used their own encryption.
This
Read the rest
is enough for the security community to decide that Telegram is a bad product(tm).
I'm not arguing in defense of telegram, I'm just letting you know what happens to "secure messengers" under a microscope.
The same criticism has not been levied to Signal, despite them offering no more protection in real terms than HTTPS would. There are theoretical safety-nets but nothing you can concretely audit.
Your argument that "it's their code they can do what they like" holds as much water as an inverted plate, given the context that they've chosen to live under.
So, instead of attempting to talk me down with and Argument from fallacy[2] perhaps you can talk about this point.
[0]: https://www.system-transparency.org/
[1]: https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
I think there are only experiments. From what I know Oasis Linux is furthest along https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
Another resources is https://sta.li/
I thought there was a Archlinux-based attempt, but can't find references to that.
In “Static Linking Considered Harmful” Considered HarmfulSuch a thing exists - https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
In Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I canhttps://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
>"A major goal of oasis is to build with
cproc, a C compiler which is much stricter about the ISO C standard than gcc or clang, and orders of magnitude smaller.
Although this is a work-in-progress effort, all core packages, and most others, build successfully with cproc."
In Cproc – a C11 compiler using QBE as a back end> I was ever so slightly disappointed to see how manual the packaging is, with every .c file listed in each lua script. It looks quite maintenance-intensive.
I was worried about this, too, but it turns out most of the cost in just the initial packaging. Packages do not tend to change their build system very much in between releases, so updating is usually just `git diff` between the version tags, sometimes adding/removing a couple source files to `gen.lua`, and regenerating `config.h`.
I'm just one person, but I've been able to keep these 100 or so packages up-to-date fairly easily, while still spending most of my time developing my own projects.
> I was almost hoping for some kind of meta-build system which could parse automake etc. files and hoist the dependency graph into the main system build.
This would be amazing, but I think it is
Read the rest
too difficult a problem to solve, especially with the huge variety of build systems (which are sometimes used pretty creatively). For some packages I get part of the way there with scripts or command snippets to extract source lists from the upstream build system. Here's an example:
https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis/blob/master/pkg/mpv/gens...
One of the main motivations for the oasis build system is that it is often very difficult to get the upstream build system to do what you want. It is very common for projects to ignore your CFLAGS or LDFLAGS, ignore special include/lib directories for dependencies, or have automagic dependencies (to borrow a term from gentoo) that can't be enabled/disabled explicitly with a configure switch. Also, most build systems don't work very well for building things statically. libtool will intercept your -static flag, hiding it from the compiler, and libraries which are dependencies of other libraries get left out from the linking command.
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