Images with reduced sizes are used alongside production images for tasks such as rescue systems and manufacturing test processes. They are also ideal to be built as initramfs images, that is, images that the Linux kernel mounts from memory, and can even be bundled into a single Linux kernel image binary.

By default, the core-image-minimal size for the Wandboard unpacked root filesystem tarball is around 13 MB, and core-image-sato is around 244 MB. This recipe will explore methods to reduce the size of the root filesystem.