5.15. Building a Tiny System

Very small distributions have some significant advantages such as requiring less on-die or in-package memory (cheaper), better performance through efficient cache usage, lower power requirements due to less memory, faster boot times, and reduced development overhead. Some real-world examples where a very small distribution gives you distinct advantages are digital cameras, medical devices, and small headless systems.

This section presents information that shows you how you can trim your distribution to even smaller sizes than the poky-tiny distribution, which is around 5 Mbytes, that can be built out-of-the-box using the Yocto Project.