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<rickmasters>Good news: I have compiled Fiwix with tcc 0.9.27 and booted it successfully.

<rickmasters>It was built on Linux (outside of live-bootstrap) and booted with qemu.

<rickmasters>The tcc I used was built with gcc on Linux.

<rickmasters>I had to make a few minor changes to tcc and Fiwix.

<rickmasters>It did take quite a bit of effort to figure out what needed to change, though.

<stikonas>that's faster than I expected

<rickmasters>I thought building with tcc was going to take more time and effort so I'm happy with the pace of progress so far.

<rickmasters>I am now going to move onto building and booting Fiwix as part of live-bootstrap.

<rickmasters>By the way, the author released a new kernel version and OS this week.

<rickmasters>See https://github.com/mikaku/Fiwix and https://www.fiwix.org/

<rickmasters>He pronounces it "Few Weeks" and that's meant to reflect how fast you can learn it.

<stikonas>so you'll insert another system before sysb/sysc?

<stikonas>hopefully Fiwix can last all the way to gcc

<rickmasters>stikonas: not sure yet, but I think so

<rickmasters>stikonas: I think I'll need to go straight to tcc-0.9.27 after tcc-0.9.26 and then build any support tools and artifacts to boot Fiwix

<stikonas>that might need repacking tcc 0.9.27

<stikonas>upstream only ships .tar.bz2 https://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/tinycc/

<rickmasters>yes, I think it would need a repackage

<rickmasters>or we build gzip without make

<stikonas>it's bzip2, not just gzip

<stikonas>gzip can be built without make, presumably bzip2

<stikonas>but bzip2 needs patch

<stikonas>oh, maybe it doesn't if we use kaem script rather than their makefile

<stikonas>hmm, we actually patch bzip2 to work with mes (meslibc does not have any time support)

<stikonas>which could be fixed on meslibc side by adding stubs

<rickmasters>Another possibility is to build Fiwix with tcc-0.9.26. I haven't tried yet

<stikonas[m]>Might be harder...

<rickmasters>... And I might need tcc-0.9.27 for other tools so it's not my first choice

<rickmasters>But I have no qualms with repackaging tcc-0.9.27 but you've got some investment in bootstrapping bzip2 first to avoid that

<stikonas[m]>Those early packages were moved around quite a bit

<stikonas[m]>But without any kernel in sight it was not clear what is better

<stikonas[m]>Right now it was optimised for fewest kaem scripts, so make was built early

<stikonas[m]>But turns out make does need quite a bit more powerful kernel

<stikonas[m]>But repackaging is fine.

<stikonas[m]>Tcc 0.9.26 is patched and repackaged

<rickmasters>I can stage a repackage in the boot2now repo for now. Eventually I'd like to merge everything from boot2now into live-bootstrap.

<rickmasters>But that's a lot of work and somewhat disruptive.

<rickmasters>I wanted to make it work first. It's getting there.

<rickmasters>I'm presuming you'd want it... The boot2now process is oriented towards the builder-hex0 kernel which is quite different and would be difficult to integrate as a live-bootstrap option.

<stikonas>yes, builder-hex0 is quite a bit different (especially file system stuff)

<stikonas>well, let's start with fiwix and we'll see how it goes

<stikonas>rickmasters: actually, can fiwix be used as qemu seed kernel in live-bootstrap?

<stikonas>rather than starting with some linux

<stikonas>that might be a fairly easy test

<rickmasters>stikonas: i'm going to try it as a seed kernel for testing purposes soon

<rickmasters>I think it requires so work because Fiwix uses ext2 for it's initrd

<rickmasters>To be clear, that's just a test to see how far it can take us, because it's not a proper bootstrap seed like builder-hex0

<rickmasters>But maybe you're thinking its simpler to start with than linux...?

<stikonas>yes, I was indeed thinking about this for these two purposes: 1. check how far proper bootstrap can take it. 2. It's a smaller seed than linux. And also might help to catch some more reproducibility issues

<rickmasters>it will be an interesting test. I'll let you know how it goes. Probably tomorrow

<oriansj>rickmasters: sounds very exciting

IRC channel logs

2022-11-18.log