Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
84 lines (68 loc) · 4.67 KB

Guix.md

File metadata and controls

84 lines (68 loc) · 4.67 KB

Guix

Bootstrapping info

Upstream: https://guix.gnu.org/

Bootstrapping documentation: No complete docs, but these are useful:

Requirements: Linux with autotools, make, C/C++ compiler, Guile + several modules

Automation: Mostly automated, but several manual steps required to build system image

Integration testing: Yes, with Cuirass

What you get: Any kind of system you can describe in a guix configuration, up to and including a desktop

Can install further software from source: Yes, with guix system reconfigure

Notes:

  • Guix will rebuild everything from a tiny seed!. Though it does first have to build several deendencies on the host, and this excludes some systems such as Haskell/GHC, which are bootstrapped from binaries.
  • The build process feels flaky, it took several tries to get it exactly right.

Manual testing

Version: Git commit 670724e on 2025-05-04

Architecture: x86_64

Date: 2025-06-04

Build time: About 3 days with i7-9750H

Testing process

  • The build process took many tries to get right due to bugs or other issues:
    • Guix needs many Guile packages, which few distros have. Guix's last release is years old, and building from git appears to need the very new guile-git 0.10.0
    • Guix is unhappy building in a container
    • Guix can fail to bootstrap as non-root.
    • Guix doesn't build with GCC 15
    • Building on Fedora yielded mysterious post-bootstap errors about a badly typed repository location
    • Guix runs the tests for each package, which occasionally fail spuriously
  • Let's build on Debian unstable, since the experimental distro tends to have very up-to-date guix packages
    • Install Debian trixie RC1
    • Upgrade to sid, and enable experimental
    • Install dependencies: apt -t experimental build-dep guix
  • Build Guix
    • git clone https://git.guix.gnu.org/guix.git
    • cd guix
    • We only have Guile-Git 0.9.0, so choose the commit before this one
      • git reset --hard 86022e9^
    • Get GCC 14: apt install g++-14
    • ./bootstrap
    • CXX=g++-14 ./configure
    • make -j12 scripts/guix all
    • sudo make install
  • Authenticate
    • git fetch origin keyring:keyring
    • guix git authenticate 9edb3f66fd807b096b48283debdcddccfea34bad "BBB0 2DDF 2CEA F6A8 0D1D E643 A2A0 6DF2 A33A 54FA"
  • Setup the daemon as root:
    • Although it's recommended to run unprivileged with user namespaces, some tests fail that way. Instead run as root.
    • groupadd --system guixbuild
    • for i in $(seq -w 1 10); do useradd -g guixbuild -G guixbuild -d /var/empty -s $(which nologin) -c "Guix build user $i" --system guixbuilder$i; done
    • Create dirs: mkdir -p /gnu/store /var/guix /var/guix/tmp /var/log/guix /etc/guix
    • Just run the daemon manually, rather than with systemd: sudo env TMPDIR=/var/guix/tmp guix-daemon --max-jobs=3 --no-substitutes --build-users-group=guixbuild
      • Set TMPDIR so our builds don't use up all RAM in a tmpfs.
  • Pull:
    • sudo install -d -o $USER /var/guix/profiles/per-user/$USER
    • guix pull -v3 -k * This bootstraps from scratch, taking over a day
    • Setup profile: export GUIX_PROFILE=/home/$USER/.config/guix/current; . "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile
  • Build a system image disk
    • Create a custom system description file, to force compiling from source insead of using binary "substitutes"
    • Build an image: guix system image --image-type=efi-raw --image-size=30GB --root=guix.img guix-no-subs.scm -v3 -k --timeout=360000 --max-silent-time=360000
  • It boots in QEMU, with UEFI turned on
    • Log in
    • Use tune2fs -L my-root /dev/sda2 to label the filesystem to match the specification
    • Can sudo guix pull -v3 -k --max-jobs=3. This bootstraps all over again!
    • Put the guix-no-subs.scm file at /etc/config.scm, and guix system reconfigure -v3 -k --max-jobs=3 /etc/config.scm
      • This again does a full bootstrap
  • You can follow up by editing your config to add other packages, services
    • You may want to expand the image first