Ludovic Courtès
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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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@ -103,6 +103,7 @@ LOG_COMPILER = \
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$(GUILE) --no-auto-compile -L "$(top_srcdir)"
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EXTRA_DIST = \
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HACKING \
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.dir-locals.el \
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build-aux/download.scm \
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srfi/srfi-64.scm \
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