Linux System on a Floppy

Referring to my previous project to build a Linux distribution for LOADLIN. It is actually possible to also boot this directly from a 1.44M floppy disk, which can be quite useful. The output from that build should be the Linux kernel "bzImage" and the root filesystem "rootfs.cramfs". I renamed "rootfs.cramfs" to simply "rootfs" to avoid any conflicts with the 8.3 filename format.

SYSLINUX will be used for booting, and it needs "syslinux.cfg" configuration file with the followng contents:

DEFAULT linux
LABEL linux
  KERNEL bzImage
  APPEND initrd=rootfs
          

These are the steps to make the floppy disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=512 count=2880
mkdosfs floppy.img
syslinux --install floppy.img
mkdir /tmp/floppy
mount -o loop floppy.img /tmp/floppy
cp bzImage /tmp/floppy/
cp rootfs /tmp/floppy/
cp syslinux.cfg /tmp/floppy/
umount /tmp/floppy
          

The floppy disk image can be tested in QEMU with:

qemu-system-i386 -fda floppy.img -boot a
          

Writing the floppy disk image to an actual floppy disk is typically done like so:

dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=512
          

For convenience, download the floppy disk image here.