Tine: A Build System That Turns Thin Air into Bootable OS Images

From Thin Air to Bootable Images: The Tine Build System

Tine: A Build System That Turns Thin Air into Bootable OS Images

Daan De Meyer and Martin Pitt introduce tine, a new Buck2-based build system for creating cryptographically verifiable operating systems. Tine requires only git, python3, and user namespaces on the host, then bootstraps everything from pinned declarations. It builds rpm, Rust, and Go components, UKIs, and bootable images with hermetic, reproducible builds. The post explains why existing tools like mkosi, OBS, BuildStream, and Antlir fell short, and walks through building a Fedora Rawhide image with a Go tool.

tine has only three requirements on its build host: git, python3 (just for its own bootstrapping, not for production builds) and user namespaces.

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2026-09-26