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2026-06-05.log
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<lanodan>siraben: I once had bootstrap-initrd (tcc+musl manually seeded from Alpine apks) working for jslinux on riscv https://hacktivis.me/jslinux/vm.html but I need to debug it a bit (plus I really wish Fabrice Bellard would distribute the tarball of latest jslinux). <siraben>This is for running alpine docker. gets to tcc in around 15 minutes for me on my machine <siraben>glad to see that people keep stumbling on the same tasks <aggi>nice aspect with YASM moved into tiny-bootstrap, it's a drop-in replacement for GNU as almost, and is available early during live-bootstrap <aggi>there's too a chance yasm can process the syslinux/isolinux.asm pieces which follows NASM syntax <aggi>to my knowledge isolinux.bin had not been re-assembled for a long-time (+10years) even with the gentoo ebuild i checked <aggi>together with cdrdtools, it is possible to emit x86 bootable.iso very early, long before the whole perl/autotools/python dependency graph builds up <aggi>it's will not be some isohybrid one though, because isohbyrid needs perl, so such a tiny-bootstrap.iso can be booted from cd-rw only, not usb-flash <aggi>of cause there will be support for isohybrid too, but it's more important to keep the dependency graph as small as possible with the early bootstrapping pieces <aggi>and there, emitting bootable.iso with syslinux/isolinux is a precious thing <aggi>it's x86-only though; because for all other ARCH there's a few pieces missing, and it's unavoidable hence to build up the complete dependency graph up until linux5+/GRUB2 <aggi>which is a peculiarity still in GNU live-bootstrap, grub2 bootloader is available rather late (don't know if it could be moved into the early steps/ before autotools/perl etc) <aggi>the busybox-1.2 is done already too, so it's cdrtools missing mainly (whose buildsystem is a pain, i've almost complete this step/ nonetheless) <aggi>the major criteria seems to be support for other ARCH, which threatens live-bootstrap with a dependency hell <aggi>i don't know yet about kexec-fiwix with a fully-native stage0 bootstrap, if it's kernel would permit cdrecord then, and i don't intend to divert too much from live-bootstrap <aggi>but a kexec-linux for the 2.4 fork here is a feasible option too; currently i'm testing inside /chroot anyway <aggi>and well, i've not moved the linux-tcc Kbuild.sh into a steps/pass.sh script yet, should be trivial almost <aggi>just in case i'm hit by SHTF here, the most relevant pieces are uploaded to codeberg.org already <aggi>except cdrtools since it's shell-scripting, tbh, just sucks (i got that zipped into a custom ebuild here for cross-compilation support and static linking with tcc already) <aggi>but i've raised the QA a tad bit for the re-integration into configurator/steps/ system <aggi>since the full(!) portage fork fur tcc-toolchain support, it's hundreds of patches and hacks all over the place for ~500ebuilds which i just tried to make it work somehow <aggi>that's why i don't want to git-push that, because it's too much clutter and confusion <aggi>in any case, this type of x86 bootstrapped C-toolchain driven system-integration must not be lost <aggi>the fact it's tied to some ancient linux-2.4 kernel is one of it's great benefits besides <aggi>because, for any ARCH other then x86, you _must_ use some most recent kernel versions almost always <aggi>that's why, for example, RISC-V or aarch64 are problematic; those do need some recent gcc4.x at least and most recent kernel versions <aggi>so it's too moot to discuss, if GNU mes, gcc and the whole infrastructure should be ported for riscv/aarch64, you _must_ do this for those ARCH <aggi>you can't just easily pick some older or exotic kernel - i'm not aware of any for riscv/aarch64 to begin with <aggi>there's been notable political nonsense debates spilled over some of my proposals elsewhere <aggi>(which wasn't foss people, but some other realm entangled into EU/politics/shareholder interests invested into things like helsing.ai) <aggi>and i'm too seeing, EU was funding some notable pieces of live-bootstrap <aggi>after all, what i've been through in recent month again, with ignorance and denial including that of EU and government cash affiliated entities <aggi>see, when skimming job proposals at helsing.ai while ago (out of curiosity), that's all been rust-lang there <aggi>EU dumped hundreds of millions into this alone <aggi>then, i've summed up a few notes at my web-site, and found all of the sudden some high-ranking charlatans and posers in EU politics hijack terminology of my scribblings <aggi>and ALL my inquiries got denied again meanwhile, at dozens of universities, hr offices, startup funding <aggi>but ministry of defense in germany boasts about the great "interoperability" of their investments <aggi>all else, they rather not get lost in menial "tiny tiny little details" <aggi>anyway, a few of those political charlatans got beheaded, FDP liberal party here, who are closely attached to FSF Europe in Hamburg <aggi>and of cause, they're all a little nervouse, because Nvidia shareholder holder value is on loose ground <aggi>i mean, i couldn't care less if anyone is doing the dirty work for RISCV for them <aggi>other than that, i was considered for hiring as professor at a university in Thuringia <aggi>for that matter i was occupied with other tasks than system integration in my "carreer" <aggi>but in the end, their council couldn't consent with anything, and after more than 6month i gave up asking again <aggi>this university demanded just _more_ documents without any contracting nor salary, to showcase i was sufficiently qualified with what i'm doing <aggi>and i suspect it's been Telekom (the political aspect of it, not the technical one) again involved behind the scenes, since they're donating professors for "digital transformation" <aggi>i've got some real bad memories of the interference of such entities <ekaitz>aggi: the gcc4.x riscv64 work is "done" <ekaitz>it's probably not great, but there it is <ekaitz>and I don't expect aarch64 to be hard to add <aggi>i'm trapped in x86 for other reasons <aggi>but it doesn't matter anymore anyway <FransFaase>aleksi_: We got tcc-0.9.26 and tcc-0.9.27 compiled on AArch64 producing AArch64. Yesterday, I asked if it was worth the effort for creating a pull request for live-bootstrap and I did not get an answer. The patches (involving some files from musl) also work for x86_64/amd64. <aleksi>Nice, I for one would like to see this hit live-bootstrap some day. I think the next step realistically would be porting Fiwix <aggi>just keep in mind i failed porting qemu with tinycc/linux-2.4 to align qemu a little bit closer to bootstrappable criteria <aggi>in practice this doesn't matter alot, if any aarch64/riscv etc were test-run on qemu <aggi>for myself (Tinycc/OS) i excluded qemu already from the list <aggi>just keep in mind, qemu opens a giant can of worms, in particular it's recent versions (documented on tinycc-devel while ago) <aggi>siraben: early versions of qemu, that was a few MiB for their source.tar.gz, nowadays it's >150MiB already <aggi>all else is just a side note, such as compiling this with tcc (after all both tcc and qemu originate from bellard) <alganet>In other news, I completed the first abuild prototype. From firmware (not inclusive) to first-kernel (builder-hex0 inspired) up to mes-m2 in 4 architectures, plus some variants https://github.com/alganet/abuild (x86-bios, amd64-uefi, aarch64-virt, aarch64-raspi3b, riscv64-uefi, riscv64-virt, riscv64-sifive_u). <alganet>That includes prototype work on stage0-uefi, m2libc (stil out of sync with upstream though) and bootstrap-seeds (for riscv64-uefi). I'll be focusing now on polishing those so they're ready for contributing back. <alganet>It's likely that the new builder-hex0 inspired new kernels (riscv64, aarch64) are too slow and buggy by the way. They were literally tested just up to mes-m2. I remember seeing a lot of work on builder-hex0 x86 needed to run the following steps, and I'm not there yet, but they do complete stage0 flawlessly with checksum verification for now (CI <aleksi>Oh wow, fun to see another approach at the aarch64 backend <aleksi>abuild in general seems interesting <siraben>oh wow, very cool to see another person do CI for their builds too