Build your own: other images

An official image

The official ps5-linux-image builder makes the same images as its release page: Ubuntu, Arch, CachyOS and Fedora, or only the kernel packages. It needs Docker and about 30 GB of free disk space.

# On Windows, run this inside WSL (install it first with: wsl --install)
sudo apt update && sudo apt install docker.io -y
sudo service docker start
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

git clone https://github.com/ps5-linux/ps5-linux-image
cd ps5-linux-image
chmod +x ./build_image.sh

# Single distro: ubuntu2604, arch, cachyos or fedora
./build_image.sh --distro ubuntu2604
./build_image.sh --distro cachyos

# Multi-distro (Ubuntu + Arch + CachyOS, 32 GB image)
./build_image.sh --distro all

# Build only the kernel packages (.deb / .pkg.tar.zst), no image
./build_image.sh --kernel-only

# Build against a specific ps5-linux-patches branch, tag or commit
./build_image.sh --distro arch --patches-ref main

Images are written to output/; kernel-only builds go to linux-bin/. A second run reuses the kernel and root filesystem from the cache; --clean starts from scratch.

WSL running out of memory during the build?

Create or edit C:\Users\<you>\.wslconfig and raise the memory limit:

C:\Users<you>.wslconfig

[wsl2]
memory=8GB

Then restart WSL with wsl --shutdown.

Only the kernel

On an image that already runs, you don't need a new image to change the kernel: install rmuxnet's release, build his or the official patch set with build.sh or by hand, and copy the result to the boot partition, see Kernel setup. The loader starts whatever bzImage and initrd.img are on the boot partition, so a kernel built for one image runs on another as long as its modules are installed there.