Summary: The nolibc project is a minimal C-library emulation for small, low-level workloads that was introduced in the Linux kernel 5.1 release. It aims to provide a solution for kernel-only deployments, where a system is booted only to run a single tiny program. The project was created by Willy Tarreau, who has been building emergency routers, firewalls, and traffic generators for 25 years, and needed a small program called preinit that could fit into 800KB kernels. The preinit code had to be minimal, avoiding stdio or high-level C-library functions and reusing code and data as much as possible, resulting in code that could be statically built and remain small.