Notices by Janneke (janneke@todon.nl), page 4

GNU Guix/Hurd now runs on my x60 (32bit) with full disk support (rumpdisk) and networking support (netdde). Patch sets are underway.

Looking into native guix builds right now.

@fsf
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@clacke
I'd like to think that I'm well funded which enablse me to do things that are important and fun.
I'd also like to think that all my time is my own; technically my current Hurd work isn't funded, but that's how Mes started off too, so yeah.

@Mae @fsf @fsfe
Yeah it is, isn't it? Started out as a lucid dream, 7y ago.

@maltimore @fsf @fsfe
Some reasons for this include: The process wasn't documented, the code was lost, used many different hardwares, it took about 50 years, untangling history is _hard_.

For that last remark, just look at the Java or Rust bootstraps (they needed _many_, _many_ steps) or the sheer impossibility to bootstrap the NPM/Node distaster.

@vertigo @bugaevc @theruran
Yeah. One of the things that helped a lot, especially in the first couple of years, was the enormous amount of mental support that I got.

@byterhymer @fsf @fsfe
For me personally (see the blog post) that would be: cleaning-up the FSB---we cut quite some corners---, getting rid of the ancient gcc-2.95.3 dependency (directly build gcc-4.6.4), getting Gash/Gash-Utils to run on top of Mes, and and RISC-V support, hopefully followed by ARM/AArch64.

But yeah, I really hope that others will address the hardware and kernel bits of the bootstrap!

@ArneBab
I got Mes built on the Hurd once, so there is _some_ support. No support in Stage0 yet, though.

@ArneBab
Thanks, Arne! Maybe something Hurd'ish?

@joeyh
Thanks! Yeah, got to have some more hacking to look forward too ;)

@csepp @bugaevc
Thanks, DuskOS looks pretty interesting. I think it's the first real bootstrapping effort I've seen built on Forth (after hearing a bit too often: Why don't you use Forth, bootstrapping will be triviial).

Especially as it seems that our efforts are largely complementary.

@bugaevc
Good question! Of course: you can't.

There is currently no good answer to that other than that we chose to start on getting rid of the obviously unnecessary and "easy" binary seeds first. Or: different people have different interests and competences, if we start then eventually we'll probably get there someday. There are some ideas, though.

The least elegant but easiest "solution" would be to revert to Diverse Double Compliing (DDC, https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/). The low level tools (stage0, m2-planet, and mes) can easily do cross builds. You could build on different architectures, and kernels if you like and compare package checksums.

We did something like this for Mes (all x86_64-linux, though) at the fifth reproducible builds conference (RB-V, https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2019/reproducible-builds-summit-5th-edition/)

Running as PID 1: During the same RB-V conference, Ludovic Courtès prototyped building a Guix package in the initial ramdisk. After the build the package is discarded, but before that its checksum is printed and can be checked with a build under GNU/Linux.

People have been working to build tiny kernels, such as: https://github.com/ironmeld/boot2now.

Also, Stage0 was designed to also run on the Knight VM, one could imagine running that on simpler hardware, or running the VM on different machines/architectures, dunno.

@dthompson This is currently only i686-linux and x86_64-linux.

Work has been ongoing for ARMv7 (and AArch64) for quite some time now, but is stalled, probably until we have RISC-V.

Yessss! GNU Guix/Hurd builds with rumpdisk, a major step towards running on real iron!
You'll need these patch sets:

* https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63641
* https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63527 (comment #38 has a QEMU example)

or download this image

https://dezyne.org/janneke/c2f2lpvfp05pw2isihgbwx6f1b1l0hwh-disk-image.xz

@fsf
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@fsf @fsfe
And here's the blog post:

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/

If you run "guix pull" today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program---something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix: a Full-Source Bootstrap.

#GnuMes
#bootstrappable
#BootstrappableBuilds
#ReproducibleBuilds
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