4.1. Analysis

In the previous chapter it might seem like we did not accomplish very much. A lot of energy was expended redesigning the root disk, but the functionality is basically the same as in the initial prototype phase. The root disk still does not do very much. But we did make significant improvements when it comes to space savings. In this chapter we will put that extra space to good use and start cramming the root disk with as many utilities as it can hold.

The first two root disks we built only had shell built-in commands like echo and pwd. This time it would be nice to have some of the commonly used external commands like cat, ls, mkdir, rm and such on the root disk. Keeping this in mind we can define the goals for this phase as follows:

• Retain all of the functionality from the previous root disk.

• Add some of the commonly used external commands.