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-*- mode: org; coding: utf-8; -*- |
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#+TITLE: Hacking Guix and its incredible distro |
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Copyright © 2012 Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> |
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Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, |
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are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright |
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notice and this notice are preserved. |
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* Porting the Guix distro on a new platform |
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** Introduction |
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Unlike Make or similar build tools, Guix requires absolutely /all/ the |
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dependencies of a build process to be specified. |
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For a user-land software distribution, that means that the process that |
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builds GCC (then used to build all other programs) must itself be |
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specified; and the process to build the C library to build that GCC; and |
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the process to build the GCC to build that library; and... See the |
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problem? Chicken-and-egg. |
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To break that cycle, the distro starts from a set of pre-built |
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binaries–usually referred to as “bootstrap binaries.” These include |
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statically-linked versions of Guile, GCC, Coreutils, Make, Grep, sed, |
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etc., and the GNU C Library. |
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This section describes how to build those bootstrap binaries when |
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porting to a new platform. |
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** When the platform is supported by Nixpkgs |
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In that case, the easiest thing is to bootstrap the distro using |
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binaries from Nixpkgs. |
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To do that, you need to comment out the definitions of |
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‘%bootstrap-guile’ and ‘%bootstrap-inputs’ in distro/packages/base.scm |
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to force the use of Nixpkgs derivations. For instance, when porting to |
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‘i686-linux’, you should redefine these variables along these lines: |
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#+BEGIN_SRC scheme |
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(define %bootstrap-guile |
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(nixpkgs-derivation "guile" "i686-linux")) |
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(define %bootstrap-inputs |
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(compile-time-value |
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`(("libc" ,(nixpkgs-derivation "glibc" "i686-linux")) |
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,@(map (lambda (name) |
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(list name (nixpkgs-derivation name "i686-linux"))) |
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'("gnutar" "gzip" "bzip2" "xz" "patch" |
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"coreutils" "gnused" "gnugrep" "bash" |
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"gawk" ; used by `config.status' |
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"gcc" "binutils"))))) |
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#+END_SRC |
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That should allow the distro to be bootstrapped. |
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Then, the tarballs containing the initial binaries of Guile, Coreutils, |
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GCC, libc, etc. need to be built. To that end, run the following |
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commands: |
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#+BEGIN_SRC sh |
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./pre-inst-env guix-build \ |
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-e '(@@ (distro packages base) %guile-bootstrap-tarball)' \ |
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--system=i686-linux |
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./pre-inst-env guix-build \ |
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-e '(@@ (distro packages base) %bootstrap-binaries-tarball)' \ |
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--system=i686-linux |
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./pre-inst-env guix-build \ |
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-e '(@@ (distro packages base) %binutils-bootstrap-tarball)' \ |
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--system=i686-linux |
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./pre-inst-env guix-build \ |
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-e '(@@ (distro packages base) %glibc-bootstrap-tarball)' \ |
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--system=i686-linux |
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./pre-inst-env guix-build \ |
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-e '(@@ (distro packages base) %gcc-bootstrap-tarball)' \ |
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--system=i686-linux |
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#+END_SRC |
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These should build tarballs containing statically-linked tools usable on |
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that system. |
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In the source tree, you need to install binaries for ‘mkdir’, ‘bash’, |
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‘tar’, and ‘xz’ under ‘distro/packages/bootstrap/i686-linux’. These |
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binaries can be extracted from the static-binaries tarball built above. |
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A rule for |
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‘distro/packages/bootstrap/i686-linux/guile-bootstrap-2.0.6.tar.xz’ |
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needs to be added in ‘Makefile.am’, with the appropriate hexadecimal |
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vrepresentation of its SHA256 hash. |
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You may then revert your changes to ‘base.scm’. For the variables |
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‘%bootstrap-coreutils&co’, ‘%bootstrap-binutils’, ‘%bootstrap-glibc’, |
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and ‘%bootstrap-gcc’, the expected SHA256 of the corresponding tarballs |
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for ‘i686-linux’ (built above) must be added. |
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This should be enough to bootstrap the distro without resorting to |
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Nixpkgs. |
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** When the platform is *not* supported by Nixpkgs |
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In that case, the bootstrap binaries should be built using whatever |
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tools are available on the target platform. That is, the tarballs and |
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binaries show above must first be built manually, using the available |
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tools. |
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They should have the same properties as those built by the Guix recipes |
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shown above. For example, all the binaries (except for glibc) must be |
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statically-linked; the bootstrap Guile must be relocatable (see patch in |
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the Guix distro); the static-binaries tarball must contain the same |
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programs (Coreutils, Grep, sed, Awk, etc.); and so on. |
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