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rando103747202 9 hours ago [-]
LFS takes the wrong approach in my opinion. I did it once manually over a couple of days. I suppose I hoped enduring the pain of waiting for the packages to compile would somehow make me smarter. It didn’t. I didn’t learn much. It was like following a baking recipe. I know I need to add eggs and sugar in the ratio it says but I’d be damned if I could tell you why that specific ratio works.
It’s just too much to take in at once. You start by building a cross compilation toolchain but… why? And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?
I reckon a better approach would be to build it step by step, only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. First you get the bootloader working, then you get it to actually load the initramfs and kernel, etc… you could even create your own extremely simple initramfs first before adding dracut, etc…
This gets you to a system you can boot and play with asap. And then you can slowly start to discover why you actually need all these things through exploration and experimentation.
degaart 7 hours ago [-]
I'd like to counter your comment.
LFS helped me a lot. It taught me how to compile packages manually, and how GNU/Linux components fit together.
Armed with that knowledge, I could do things others could not do:
- Make applications that bundle/automatically download their dependencies, compile them with custom flags (static linking)
- Diagnose build errors buried in deep dependencies when using vcpkg
- Compile programs for esotheric systems: e.g: Intel MacOS X 10.5, an obsolete system noone else on earth is using except the company I worked at
- Create application targetting obsolete systems but using the latest version of its dependencies
- Compile recent programs on esotheric systems, by bootstraping a newer gcc on the newer system, patching as necessary
- Create my own stripped down distro, tuned to my specifications
- Use that stripped distro as a docker container
- Run recent linux on obsolete hardware no longer supported by mainstream distros
- Reformat a cloud dedicated server without physical access by first bootstraping a minimal distro on a ramdisk, unmounting the main drive, partitioning that drive, and installing the new distro on that drive. Reboot and pray.
- Build a cross-compiler for targetting a freestanding environment
- Build latest KDE/XFCE for debian stable. No more "but debian ships with outdated software!!11"
- Build applications on a distro they were not designed for (Zimbra OSE on debian)
mobilio 10 minutes ago [-]
For me also helps me to cross compile Nvidia kernel drivers for other version of kernel than running one. Plus compile stripped-down version of X.
All this for running on embedded Linux with 32MB flash drive running from read-only volume powering two kiosk displays.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Learning how to compile packages manually it was a common skill long before Linux came to be, and how GNU/Linux fits together could also easily be learnt with Slackware or Yggdrasil.
Intermernet 3 hours ago [-]
As someone who started using Linux in 1996 (Slackware, of course), I learnt the hard way about compiling packages. I remember trying to compile the kernel, and doing "make config" and following hundreds of options, and not knowing that I then needed to do "make" or "make zimage" or "make install" after any of the config stuff. Obvious, dumb, rookie errors, but still understandable for a teenager coming from Windows. Doing LFS really taught me a lot about dependencies and complexity, as well as understanding of the actual boot process. All of this helped me greatly in later years.
immmmmm 4 hours ago [-]
I started with Slackware 1.0 on i386.
I certainly do not miss compiling X11!
fuzztester 5 hours ago [-]
>Learning how to compile packages manually it was a common skill long before Linux came to be
Right. I used to compile many open source packages from source on many flavors of Unix back in the day, for years. Perl, Python, MySQL, many others. Miscellaneous utilities. Esoteric languages. Even Oracle, once, on a Unix server, right at a large manufacturing company site. Even building Unix kernels from source was common on some Unix versions. And not just for a regular install. Many times, (re)building Unix kernels from source, was the only way to get some software packages or hardware devices or peripherals, like printers or terminal controllers or even hard disk controllers, to work on the system. Typically you would edit some config files or settings files manually, change values of params, or in some cases use a TUI to do that, and then rebuild via a makefile. You had to save the old kernel in case the new one didn't work, and if so, lather, rinse, repeat, till everything did work.
And that practice was nothing special. A lot if people did it routinely. Most, in fact, I'd say. Talking about devs and sysadmins here, not end users, although some of the latter probably did it too.
Many apps, tools and utilities came as source code, often in a .tar or .tar.gz file. You would untar or gunzip it into a new directory, and do your stuff, running makefiles, other shell commands, setting env. vars., etc.
motbus3 58 minutes ago [-]
I agree with you. Maybe the person from the first comment read first few pages only which basically give some context.
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
None of that requires LFS; I compiled KDE via scripts many years ago. Why would LFS be needed for that? That makes no sense. Debian being slow is their problem, other distributions aren't snail-like like that. The default compiler used in LFS is also hardly a real cross-compiler, it is more a bare-minimum compiler for C/C++. This annoys me because e. g. I need fortran for R, so a bare-minimum compiler isn't as useful as a more feature-complete GCC. And GCC also causes some issues, e. g. like my problem with options.cc.
I think you missed the main argument though - LFS isn't quite as good as it could be. That is a correct statement that was made.
smitty1e 6 hours ago [-]
"Requires"/"needed".
LFS is about the muscle memory; the documentation; the cohesiveness.
I always recommend it to people and consider it foundational to my understanding of How Stuff Works.
Whether that amounts to a hill of beans in the AI world remains to be seen.
charcircuit 6 hours ago [-]
It is more how stuff is compiled than how stuff works.
Fundamental things like how processes are scheduled are not explained by LFS.
And if you want to get to at least the bottom most visible turtle you go with something like NAND to Tetris https://www.nand2tetris.org/
wazdra 7 hours ago [-]
> It was like following a baking recipe. I know I need to add eggs and sugar in the ratio it says but I’d be damned if I could tell you why that specific ratio works.
I know a french cookbook[0] which contains not only recipes for dishes, but also for some of the intermediary ingredients, like stocks, that can now be bought at the supermarket.
I feel that I’ve learned a lot by following those recipes, be it simply in the structure of french cuisine.
And to me, LFS is a cookbook in a similar sense.
Tangential, but how good/useful/approachable is the book you cited as example?
How would it compare, in your experience, to other (modern) cooking books with a similar scope?
binarin 9 hours ago [-]
I've learned the most from LFS long time ago, when I had no internet. I had a mismatching set of Slackware and redhat source CDs, and LFS itself didn't match the versions on CDs too. Since then I can build anything and anywhere, even if it's not cooperating :)
necovek 8 hours ago [-]
As pointed out already, LFS is a cookbook, and you learn most by having an idea about how you want to tune your Linux system.
So at points you want to dive deeper, you do — and go off the beaten path.
It requires a desire not just to understand how bits and pieces fit together, but how you can make them work even better for yourself and what is and is not customizable?
Arguably, even if building it today is easier — back when I did it in 2000, you sometimes struggled to find where the canonical source code of the package is, not to mention compilation errors, linking errors, etc. Only then did you get to configuring the init RC system, choosing between them (no systemd yet), etc.
But a requirement is — IMO — that you are strongly opinionated about how a system should serve you, and look for opportunities to tune it.
tosti 7 hours ago [-]
> And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?
That actually makes perfect sense. If you did the bootloader first, how are you going to build it? How do you know what to boot from which filesystem on what device? By the time you've got your root filesystem complete, it's easy to tell.
If you do things step by step incrementally, you keep having to go further back in the process. Starting over repeatedly gets tedious, boring and frustrating. And it'll take ages to finish the complete OS.
notme43 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed, it's near the end of the Gentoo installation as well. If you forget to install GRUB, just chroot back into it and continue.
If I installed the bootloader first, I'd have to remember to run dracut after the system was installed. Or I install it last, create the init at the same time and make a habit of it.
aragilar 4 hours ago [-]
Debian and Arch are the same, grub at the end.
mrheosuper 5 hours ago [-]
You build it on your non-lfs computer. What is the other option?
And you dont need to boot anything, just a busy loop after a log "Hello World" is enough, if you feel fancy, maybe make a simple shell ?
tosti 4 hours ago [-]
You could do that, but if that were to happen to me I'd say the installer sucks and my boss should hire someone else ;)
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
Except that if you fail to install the bootloader - which happened to me many times - then you do not have a working system. So really the prior argument makes sense.
IMO the guy is right - LFS could be way better. But it has this current structure and does not deviate from it. That's the bad part.
> If you do things step by step incrementally, you keep having to go further back in the process. Starting over repeatedly gets tedious, boring and frustrating. And it'll take ages to finish the complete OS.
Pray tell how that is necessary for the bootloader? The chain used in LFS isn't the only one that makes sense or is required. IMO it would indeed be better to have a system you boot into as quickly as possible, on real hardware, then continue from there.
tosti 4 hours ago [-]
If you're going to run the OS, you have to make sure it compiles and runs the bootloader and its installer. The toolchain could be different enough for that to fail. And you do boot into a reasonably small OS and continue from there. That's what BLFS is all about.
numlock86 4 hours ago [-]
> I did it once manually over a couple of days. I suppose I hoped enduring the pain of waiting for the packages to compile would somehow make me smarter. It didn’t. I didn’t learn much.
Exactly my experience. Back in the day when all I knew was Windows and a couple of BSDs I wanted to get into Linux, because it seemed like it was going to become very relevant in the next decades. After years of slacking I thought LFS would probably be the ideal choice. Turned out it wasn't, at least for me. I ended up "learning Linux" with distros like Gentoo, Arch and later even Ubuntu, and by just replacing my production systems with Linux, which were still running on OpenBSD mostly. I have revisited LFS a couple of years ago and honestly didn't take much from it. I get the appeal, but it's not for everyone.
zvmaz 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly my experience. I tried LFS several times, but I didn't learn much. I learned more with Arch Linux, but I truly appreciate the work that was put in LFS, marvelous for the right type of learner.
sixtyj 9 hours ago [-]
LFS is known but it is really more a cookbook than explanatory principles.
This should be said more often, and in many other contexts as well.
Most educational resources are what- and how-based, only the best ones are primarily why-based, what Wirth once wrote in the preface to some Pascal book (I paraphrase) 'discussions are motivated, so that the learner gets coverage and understanding, instead of memorization'.
IslandRebel 7 hours ago [-]
You need to actually read the book and not just copy and paste commands. Many of the questions you have are answered in the book.
blablabla123 7 hours ago [-]
> I did it once manually over a couple of days.
Sounds like a speedrun of the tutorial. How did you approach packaging then and what system did you use to compile everything?
I did the tutorial in the late 2000s I think and it took me 4-6 months if I remember correctly. At the time I wasn't completely new to Linux but setting up things like the boot loader was quite tricky for me.
For me the main motivation was getting a deeper understanding, being able to fine tune and customize my system. Of course I didn't go blindly through the tutorial but only did steps that I understood. (In case something goes wrong) Also I started to use (x)stow for everything.
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
It is possible to do it over a few days really, even with not too much knowledge.
Requiring four months seems as if it was a side project, which is of course totally fine, but for any main task it really should not take more than a few days, even on a semi-slow computer (well, depends on how slow).
r3trohack3r 9 hours ago [-]
I liked KISS for this
It was like automated LFS from git
FreeBSD’s Makefile system is also in this ballpark
nullify88 9 hours ago [-]
I learned a lot doing Gentoo stage 1. I was also following the guide like a recipe, but at the time I hadn't been exposed to the underlying machinery that is often automated, abstracted away, or done for me already. It was also a good test on how well I could follow instructions and later on apply my own customisations. Like lego.
Unfortunately due to some cervical spine issues and a surgery I wasn't able to finish it, but I am planning to pick it up and continue.
viralpoetry 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks for posting this, I hope you will continue
myaccountonhn 8 hours ago [-]
Setting up Oasis <https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis> taught me more than LFS personally. Everything being statically compiled makes it less magic.
HarlequinHair 2 hours ago [-]
Except you can write bootloader only if you have something to boot.
Bootloaders as we know them came after OSes, because the need of a bootloader is to boot something.
Following your logic of building a piece only if needed, a bootloader should come after.
I like the recipe analogy and I actually think adding things only if needed will help cutting unuseful features and possibly to have different implementations for solutions you need.
No point in reinvent the whole thing, tho.
Following your analogy, if all cakes need egg, there must be a reason even if we don't know it.
convolvatron 40 minutes ago [-]
in the bad olden times you definitely started to write your operating system for your new computer from the first instruction executed upwards. it wasn't at all common to have a comprehensive virtualization/simulation environment.
HarlequinHair 15 minutes ago [-]
I can't understand what is the point you are trying to make
kaashmonee 9 hours ago [-]
I second this a thousand million times. But with AI, i can't help but admit i find myself indulging in building things backwards, now that i can try a couple different approaches simultaneously for it.
dark-star 8 hours ago [-]
I used CLFS (Cross-Linux From Scratch) once to bootstrap Linux on my SGI Indy, and I learned quite a lot from this. That was back in 2008 or so, so way before AI and extensive online guides for almost everything. It taught me how cross compilers work, what dependencies exist in the GNU toolchain, how the SGI boots, and much more.
Too bad Cross-LFS is no longer a thing. Then again, with all these microcontrollers and ARM and RISC-V systems today, cross-compiling is no longer as magic (and tricky) as it was back then...
wolfi1 6 hours ago [-]
well, if you happen to be in a 'rm -Rf /' situation (which with agentic AI seems to be more often the case) to know how to operate in a chroot environment could be helpful
sylware 4 hours ago [-]
The step by step is the right approach... but you'll discover that many 'components' are _INSANE_ and that includes their SDK.
Bare LFS is not enough (I run my own): you need a kind of userland (above glibc) multi-version system which some kind of "atomic-ish" switching (always have a stable SSH running in case something goes wrong, better than unplugging the system disk and fix it on another computer).
For linux, same thing, with a kind of flip-flop-ing for updates/fix/etc.
The insight that gives you will probably scare you: the current "open source" stack is an abomination (the worst is the SDKs I think).
That's why we need _LEAN_ open source, and that includes the SDKs.
tosti 3 hours ago [-]
If you think that's an abomination, try corporate billed-by-the-hour enterprise software where nothing ever changes unless it's approved by several layers of management.
I promised myself not to work for any of those anymore :)
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
To some extent I agree with you. I'd like to decouple some parts,
e. g. the tutorial part is great but it should ideally be distinct
from "just go at it" 1:1. I also fail to compile various things right
now, which is frustrating; two or three years ago all went well. The
whole LFS build up is too brittle. In part this is due to external
complexity, but LFS needs to re-think what it does. It's also sad that
they are now systemd-only, which further adds intrinsic uselessness. I
don't need anything systemd offers; all my boot up logic is stored in
yaml files and autogenerated to target formats via ruby as-is.
gigatexal 9 hours ago [-]
Compiling the packages doesn’t teach much it’s all the glue in between. No? It’s the startup scripts and the configs and creating a kernel and all the things.
It’s on my list of things to do when I have some free time
self_awareness 9 hours ago [-]
You know, you could also just read about each step to learn more. I mean if you feel you're following a baking recipe, you can just... read about it more. And then have LFS as a simple way to experiment if you want to change anything or not. Also, technically you don't need to have a bootloader installed on your main hard drive if you already have it on another disk.
I mean, eh... last time I checked, this was Hacker news. Yesterday, there was an Ask HN topic on how to enable dark mode on HN. Is this the new hacker culture? Complaining that the resources merely point in some direction instead of specifying details?
lukeify 9 hours ago [-]
You can tell it's written by real Linux users because the landing page UX doesn't make it immediately obvious where to even start reading.
austy69 1 hours ago [-]
Idk what to tell you if the “welcome to Linux from scratch” header wasn’t enough of a hint
fourside 50 minutes ago [-]
I thought the parent comment was missing something obvious too but if you click the top link in that section, it’s a page describing LFS but without linking to its content. Then I clicked the “Read online” link on the menu on the left, but the top links are errata and security advisories and then the main link. Not the worst navigation I’ve seen but the parent comment does have a point.
myaccountonhn 8 hours ago [-]
My journey was: Start off by clicking LFS among the links, and then "Read online" in the sidebar, and then being lost. I see a header, "Current Stable" but I can't see the link to the actual book. I only see the errata, the security advisory and a link labelled... stable LFS systemd? Maybe it's that one? Yes, yes it is.
partyficial 9 hours ago [-]
it's like their brain is unaware of the concept of a timeline
mrleinad 3 hours ago [-]
So Linux users are by definition, eternal.
voxelghost 9 hours ago [-]
It is indeed glorious.
esseph 9 hours ago [-]
... At the top? You're expected to read all of it! :)
khantto 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
boomlinde 9 hours ago [-]
Took me half a second to realize I would probably start with "LFS :: Linux From Scratch is the main book, the base from which all other projects are derived."
lukeify 8 hours ago [-]
You mean the link to a page which _also_ doesn't have the main book?
bbg2401 2 hours ago [-]
It's a link to the project page for the main book and it does a good job of explaining itself and the available resources. I guess the biggest issue is it's not immediately obvious the left navigation menu changes between the project and subproject landing pages.
phlipski 56 minutes ago [-]
About 4 years after beating my head against the wall trying to learn all about embedded linux builds and reading through yocto docs, I found a course on Udemy titled, "Embedded Linux Step by Step Using Beaglebone Black" It was perfect for walking me through the kernel, file-systems, boot-loaders, etc... It was a bit dated even then and thus required a little leg work to find the proper source versions of linux for the beagle board but I got it all working and cross-compiled a linux distro from scratch for the beagle board, flashed it, booted it and talked to it via serial port. I highly recommend the course.
Marchant_hq 3 hours ago [-]
Still remember the first time LFS booted. Felt like a true wizard, even if it was just a shell.
tugback 2 hours ago [-]
That was a weekend project once, absolutely grueling but you learn so much about the OS internals.
bmenrigh 9 hours ago [-]
For a long time (probably 2002-2010) I really wanted to do LFS. But I've been on Gentoo since 2004 which, over the last ~22 years, has probably exposed me to almost everything LFS would have, plus a lot more it wouldn't have. I still wish I'd did it way back when. I probably would stumbled through fewer issues had I.
rntksi 7 hours ago [-]
I had the same experience. I think the only thing that LFS would add to that experience would be the package-manager-less experience (building without portage's help)
dirkc 6 hours ago [-]
LFS prepared me for Gentoo :)
cmrx64 7 hours ago [-]
I kept an LFS system going for a few months (on a wretchedly awful by modern standards celeron “net top”) until eventually making a mess I couldn’t figure out how to untangle during a system upgrade. this gave me the sheer force of will necessary to later do things like own the multiplatform build system for an ocaml based distributed system (mina)
4 hours ago [-]
Celeo 10 hours ago [-]
From the news page:
> Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01
> The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.
timw4mail 1 hours ago [-]
In my experience with Gentoo, the hard stuff is well beyond the base setup: it's getting sound, bluetooth, auto-mounting, etc. setup the way it is in the bigger distros.
i_am_a_peasant 2 hours ago [-]
I kind of gained all the benefits of LFS by just maintaining a yocto embedded linux distribution at my first job for a couple of years.
Yocto is basically automated LFS, it will compile a cross toolchain then use that cross toolchain to compile everything for your target system.
B4st144n 5 hours ago [-]
I m very happy I started years ago with Gentoo which is also from scratch but with a package manager ones your system is up ( couple of days). You learn so much just starting from zero and understand choices you can make on that journey. In the end I stopped using it though, way later when the Gentoo hype was over though. Getting stuck into dependency loops wasn't productive anymore.
ammmir 5 hours ago [-]
I remember using LFS’ predecessors to build 1.44MB “rescue” floppy disks with Linux 2.0 in the 1990s. Tweak the config so it could fit on there along with a small userland. I don’t even remember if busybox was around back then.
It used to be a teenager’s rite of passage to build your kernel config, figure out LILO (remember that, pre-grub!), ipchains.. talk about feeling old!
aboardRat4 9 hours ago [-]
What's the news? This manual has been with us since forever.
steve-atx-7600 9 hours ago [-]
I'm glad to see its still being maintained after more than 25 years since I last used it.
Interesting project. Why does it use LLVM toolchain when it already builds gcc in an earlier stage?
lrvick 2 hours ago [-]
LLVM is a much more mature and modern compiler by basically every measure, and importantly, a native cross compiler unlike GCC.
One copy of LLVM can build for many architectures vs needing one GCC toolchain for every architecture you wish to target.
Also modern languages like rust require LLVM so we need it anyway, and the kernel has rust now, so why not make the most mature compiler stack the global default? Using two different compilers for the kernel would be begging for problems.
I am most optimistic for the Fil-C fork of LLVM being a default some day where we get compile time memory safety too.
We do maintain gcc in tree for legacy languages like Fortran though.
IslandRebel 6 hours ago [-]
LFS is worth doing if you are interested in learning how Linux distro is put together. There is a fair bit of reading involved. I did the entire thing in a Debian VM.
Didn't do it for a while, I would benefit from a little refresh.
Is there a Web version running in a VM/container in the browser?
halyconWays 9 hours ago [-]
I did LFS once, a long long time ago (days of RedHat 7.3, I'd say, 2002), and it was quite educational! It's a good way to learn the fundamentals of what comprises an actual Linux system
nandanadileep29 8 hours ago [-]
The best way to learn linux !
aa-jv 7 hours ago [-]
I do LFS every year, just to keep the chops sharp. It has been an immensely invaluable means of keeping informed with the way things are rolling in the Linux world.
dat999zx 7 hours ago [-]
Confirmed Linux user with the good ol 2000 web style. Great job!
cientifico 9 hours ago [-]
The fastest way to learn and remember what Linux is about
_superposition_ 5 hours ago [-]
The OG
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
LFS is great. Unfortunately nowadays I often fail to compile
it; most recently with GCC complaining and failing at options.cc.
But I also get more issues here.
I kind of need a LFS variant that is more flexible. For instance,
the part up to having a working standalone compiler, should ideally
become more robust and/or decoupled from the actual LFS build process.
Once I have a sane toolchain, the rest is trivial, ruby scripts solve
that part for me. But the build up towards that is not so reliable.
Things also fluctuate so much in the build process; I still need perl
for instance, and python wants to add more and more complexity into the
build system as well, even though meson/ninja is a nice combo. For some
reason, the build situation on Linux is not very elegant to word this
nicely. Then we also "now you need LLVM and glslang and spirv" and so
forth, and so on. The complexity always increases. To some extent I
can understand why slackware crumbled. How can a single person, even
with scripts, keep that all working?
charcircuit 8 hours ago [-]
This whole project wastes time that could be spent learning operating system design and it spends it telling users to download files, extract them, and run ./configure; make; make install 100 times.
L4XB 7 hours ago [-]
Very cool; good Job!
bellowsgulch 8 hours ago [-]
LFS is really, really bad. Also, reading the Linux kernel documentation to understand how to do it right is infuriating because it too is really, really bad.
It’s just too much to take in at once. You start by building a cross compilation toolchain but… why? And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?
I reckon a better approach would be to build it step by step, only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. First you get the bootloader working, then you get it to actually load the initramfs and kernel, etc… you could even create your own extremely simple initramfs first before adding dracut, etc…
This gets you to a system you can boot and play with asap. And then you can slowly start to discover why you actually need all these things through exploration and experimentation.
LFS helped me a lot. It taught me how to compile packages manually, and how GNU/Linux components fit together.
Armed with that knowledge, I could do things others could not do:
- Make applications that bundle/automatically download their dependencies, compile them with custom flags (static linking)
- Diagnose build errors buried in deep dependencies when using vcpkg
- Compile programs for esotheric systems: e.g: Intel MacOS X 10.5, an obsolete system noone else on earth is using except the company I worked at
- Create application targetting obsolete systems but using the latest version of its dependencies
- Compile recent programs on esotheric systems, by bootstraping a newer gcc on the newer system, patching as necessary
- Create my own stripped down distro, tuned to my specifications
- Use that stripped distro as a docker container
- Run recent linux on obsolete hardware no longer supported by mainstream distros
- Reformat a cloud dedicated server without physical access by first bootstraping a minimal distro on a ramdisk, unmounting the main drive, partitioning that drive, and installing the new distro on that drive. Reboot and pray.
- Build a cross-compiler for targetting a freestanding environment
- Build latest KDE/XFCE for debian stable. No more "but debian ships with outdated software!!11"
- Build applications on a distro they were not designed for (Zimbra OSE on debian)
All this for running on embedded Linux with 32MB flash drive running from read-only volume powering two kiosk displays.
I certainly do not miss compiling X11!
Right. I used to compile many open source packages from source on many flavors of Unix back in the day, for years. Perl, Python, MySQL, many others. Miscellaneous utilities. Esoteric languages. Even Oracle, once, on a Unix server, right at a large manufacturing company site. Even building Unix kernels from source was common on some Unix versions. And not just for a regular install. Many times, (re)building Unix kernels from source, was the only way to get some software packages or hardware devices or peripherals, like printers or terminal controllers or even hard disk controllers, to work on the system. Typically you would edit some config files or settings files manually, change values of params, or in some cases use a TUI to do that, and then rebuild via a makefile. You had to save the old kernel in case the new one didn't work, and if so, lather, rinse, repeat, till everything did work.
And that practice was nothing special. A lot if people did it routinely. Most, in fact, I'd say. Talking about devs and sysadmins here, not end users, although some of the latter probably did it too.
Many apps, tools and utilities came as source code, often in a .tar or .tar.gz file. You would untar or gunzip it into a new directory, and do your stuff, running makefiles, other shell commands, setting env. vars., etc.
I think you missed the main argument though - LFS isn't quite as good as it could be. That is a correct statement that was made.
LFS is about the muscle memory; the documentation; the cohesiveness.
I always recommend it to people and consider it foundational to my understanding of How Stuff Works.
Whether that amounts to a hill of beans in the AI world remains to be seen.
Fundamental things like how processes are scheduled are not explained by LFS.
I know a french cookbook[0] which contains not only recipes for dishes, but also for some of the intermediary ingredients, like stocks, that can now be bought at the supermarket. I feel that I’ve learned a lot by following those recipes, be it simply in the structure of french cuisine. And to me, LFS is a cookbook in a similar sense.
[0]: https://www.ferrandi-paris.com/fr/le-grand-cours-de-cuisine-... in French, sorry!
How would it compare, in your experience, to other (modern) cooking books with a similar scope?
So at points you want to dive deeper, you do — and go off the beaten path.
It requires a desire not just to understand how bits and pieces fit together, but how you can make them work even better for yourself and what is and is not customizable?
Arguably, even if building it today is easier — back when I did it in 2000, you sometimes struggled to find where the canonical source code of the package is, not to mention compilation errors, linking errors, etc. Only then did you get to configuring the init RC system, choosing between them (no systemd yet), etc.
But a requirement is — IMO — that you are strongly opinionated about how a system should serve you, and look for opportunities to tune it.
That actually makes perfect sense. If you did the bootloader first, how are you going to build it? How do you know what to boot from which filesystem on what device? By the time you've got your root filesystem complete, it's easy to tell.
If you do things step by step incrementally, you keep having to go further back in the process. Starting over repeatedly gets tedious, boring and frustrating. And it'll take ages to finish the complete OS.
If I installed the bootloader first, I'd have to remember to run dracut after the system was installed. Or I install it last, create the init at the same time and make a habit of it.
And you dont need to boot anything, just a busy loop after a log "Hello World" is enough, if you feel fancy, maybe make a simple shell ?
IMO the guy is right - LFS could be way better. But it has this current structure and does not deviate from it. That's the bad part.
> If you do things step by step incrementally, you keep having to go further back in the process. Starting over repeatedly gets tedious, boring and frustrating. And it'll take ages to finish the complete OS.
Pray tell how that is necessary for the bootloader? The chain used in LFS isn't the only one that makes sense or is required. IMO it would indeed be better to have a system you boot into as quickly as possible, on real hardware, then continue from there.
Exactly my experience. Back in the day when all I knew was Windows and a couple of BSDs I wanted to get into Linux, because it seemed like it was going to become very relevant in the next decades. After years of slacking I thought LFS would probably be the ideal choice. Turned out it wasn't, at least for me. I ended up "learning Linux" with distros like Gentoo, Arch and later even Ubuntu, and by just replacing my production systems with Linux, which were still running on OpenBSD mostly. I have revisited LFS a couple of years ago and honestly didn't take much from it. I get the appeal, but it's not for everyone.
Principles can be studied from “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces“ book - https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
Rob Love wrote the book “Linux Kernel Development”. https://rlove.org/
And then continue with reading LFS.
Most educational resources are what- and how-based, only the best ones are primarily why-based, what Wirth once wrote in the preface to some Pascal book (I paraphrase) 'discussions are motivated, so that the learner gets coverage and understanding, instead of memorization'.
Sounds like a speedrun of the tutorial. How did you approach packaging then and what system did you use to compile everything?
I did the tutorial in the late 2000s I think and it took me 4-6 months if I remember correctly. At the time I wasn't completely new to Linux but setting up things like the boot loader was quite tricky for me.
For me the main motivation was getting a deeper understanding, being able to fine tune and customize my system. Of course I didn't go blindly through the tutorial but only did steps that I understood. (In case something goes wrong) Also I started to use (x)stow for everything.
Requiring four months seems as if it was a side project, which is of course totally fine, but for any main task it really should not take more than a few days, even on a semi-slow computer (well, depends on how slow).
It was like automated LFS from git
FreeBSD’s Makefile system is also in this ballpark
Shameless plug: I started a series of blog posts exactly because this. https://serversfor.dev/linux-inside-out/
Unfortunately due to some cervical spine issues and a surgery I wasn't able to finish it, but I am planning to pick it up and continue.
Bootloaders as we know them came after OSes, because the need of a bootloader is to boot something. Following your logic of building a piece only if needed, a bootloader should come after.
I like the recipe analogy and I actually think adding things only if needed will help cutting unuseful features and possibly to have different implementations for solutions you need.
No point in reinvent the whole thing, tho. Following your analogy, if all cakes need egg, there must be a reason even if we don't know it.
Too bad Cross-LFS is no longer a thing. Then again, with all these microcontrollers and ARM and RISC-V systems today, cross-compiling is no longer as magic (and tricky) as it was back then...
Bare LFS is not enough (I run my own): you need a kind of userland (above glibc) multi-version system which some kind of "atomic-ish" switching (always have a stable SSH running in case something goes wrong, better than unplugging the system disk and fix it on another computer).
For linux, same thing, with a kind of flip-flop-ing for updates/fix/etc.
The insight that gives you will probably scare you: the current "open source" stack is an abomination (the worst is the SDKs I think).
That's why we need _LEAN_ open source, and that includes the SDKs.
I promised myself not to work for any of those anymore :)
It’s on my list of things to do when I have some free time
I mean, eh... last time I checked, this was Hacker news. Yesterday, there was an Ask HN topic on how to enable dark mode on HN. Is this the new hacker culture? Complaining that the resources merely point in some direction instead of specifying details?
> Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01
> The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.
It used to be a teenager’s rite of passage to build your kernel config, figure out LILO (remember that, pre-grub!), ipchains.. talk about feeling old!
https://github.com/vasi/bootstrappable-distros
One copy of LLVM can build for many architectures vs needing one GCC toolchain for every architecture you wish to target.
Also modern languages like rust require LLVM so we need it anyway, and the kernel has rust now, so why not make the most mature compiler stack the global default? Using two different compilers for the kernel would be begging for problems.
I am most optimistic for the Fil-C fork of LLVM being a default some day where we get compile time memory safety too.
We do maintain gcc in tree for legacy languages like Fortran though.
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709727 - Jan 2026 (103 comments)
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Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787526 - July 2020 (93 comments)
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Linux from Scratch Version 8.2 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510333 - March 2018 (2 comments)
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Welcome to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162 - Sept 2012 (71 comments)
Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published - 3.2.6 Kernel + GCC 4.6.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350 - March 2012 (13 comments)
Linux From Scratch 7 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448 - Oct 2011 (27 comments)
Ask HN: Linux from Scratch.. Should I try it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665 - Oct 2010 (58 comments)
How to build custom Linux from source code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743843 - Aug 2009 (1 comment)
Is there a Web version running in a VM/container in the browser?
I kind of need a LFS variant that is more flexible. For instance, the part up to having a working standalone compiler, should ideally become more robust and/or decoupled from the actual LFS build process. Once I have a sane toolchain, the rest is trivial, ruby scripts solve that part for me. But the build up towards that is not so reliable. Things also fluctuate so much in the build process; I still need perl for instance, and python wants to add more and more complexity into the build system as well, even though meson/ninja is a nice combo. For some reason, the build situation on Linux is not very elegant to word this nicely. Then we also "now you need LLVM and glslang and spirv" and so forth, and so on. The complexity always increases. To some extent I can understand why slackware crumbled. How can a single person, even with scripts, keep that all working?