Initially this experiment was about booting kernel directly into VM with qemu and making minimal initramfs At 29.11.2025 I decided to copy few binaries to initramfs to see if I can get a working shell. Turned out it's actually easy and adding bin/dash, 2 libs it dynamically links to at runtime (ld and libc) and making correct symlinks was enough to get me started binaries copied: /bin/dash /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 links: /init -> /bin/dash /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 -> /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 useful resources: - https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/linuxboot.html