[Aboriginal] Building a floppy rescue set like BG did? + "Android self-hosting" idea

Fri Mar 24 10:56:43 PDT 2017

Rob,

On 2017-03-25 03:54, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 03/24/2017 09:36 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
>> Rob,
>> On 2017-03-24 06:56, Rob Landley wrote:
>>> On 03/14/2017 06:11 PM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
>>>> Even if netcat works - I am still interested in building a 
>>>> floppy-booted
>>>> AL system!
>>> 
>>> You're not fitting the native toolchain on a floppy (the /usr/include
>>> headers alone _compress_ to multiple megabytes), and if you skip the
>>> native toolchain you might as well use the much simpler
>>> https://github.com/landley/mkroot build.
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks for that but see output below - although running make in the
>> ./build/toybox-0.7.3 dir worked OK . .
> 
> Let's see, that would be...
> 
>> Error output:
>> 
>> scripts/make.sh
>> Generate headers from toys/*/*.c...
>> Make generated/config.h from .config.
>> generated/flags.h Compile
>> 
> toybox......................................................................................................................................................../home/floppy_booted/toybox/airlock/ld:
>> cannot find -lselinux
>> /home/floppy_booted/toybox/airlock/ld: cannot find -lcrypto
> 
> Huh. What distro are you building this on?

Fedora 25 x86_64

> I'd like to try to reproduce
> it here. In scripts/make.sh toybox does test builds to see which
> libraries are there, and only adds the ones it can find to the link.
> This implies that it's seeing different libraries at probe time than it
> is at build time.

Right.

> When I build here, I get:
> 
> scripts/make.sh
> Generate headers from toys/*/*.c...
> generated/newtoys.h Library probe.........
> Make generated/config.h from .config.
> generated/flags.h generated/globals.h generated/tags.h generated/help.h
> 
> Which is 3 more headers being generated at the end than yours showed.
> This implies that something did a build in build/toybox-0.7.3 (filling
> it with temporary files) and _then_ ran mkroot.sh?

I just deleted the created dirs and ran the script again to be sure that 
it wasn't a different result from manually running the make in between 
running the script twice but I got the same problem . . so I am 
definitely just running "mkroot.sh" in an otherwise empty directory.

> Also, you deleted context: is this the airlock build or is it the 
> target
> build you're seeing this one? (It says "airlock" before the airlock
> build.) Did you speciry a cross compiler? (Guessing no since the page 
> of
> "glibc doesn't support static linking!" warnings shouldn't happen with
> basically any cross compiler, since none of them use glibc.)

Attached is the full output - does that help?

> (The airlock step is basically a smaller host-tools from aboriginal, I
> merged it into toybox as "make install_airlock".)

Right.

>>> I need to finish implementing the various targets' kernel builds, do 
>>> a
>>> proper release of that, write up better documentation for it 
>>> (probably a
>>> big README since github displays that), and get the control images to
>>> run under it.
>> 
>> Right.
> 
> That's basically my todo list before I have big announcements, I've 
> just
> been distracted by a half-dozen other things. (Bug reports from toybox
> in android, j-core.org stuff, so far this year I've had to fly to
> portland, tasmania, tokyo, and san francisco. Add december and I was in
> minneapolis and san diego.)

Tasmania!  If I had known you were in Oz it would have been good to 
catch up . .

>>> I also need to update the aboriginal linux website to say that the
>>> project's concluded and mkroot is the successor. I keep starting a
>>> writeup and it goes off into long explanations of the history and 
>>> what I
>>> was trying to accomplish and so on... I should just finish
>>> http://landley.net/aboriginal/history.html
>> 
>> I think I have read that before but I will have another look to see if
>> there is an updated version.
> 
> There is but it's not uploaded yet since it _also_ trails off
> midsentence. :)

No worries . .

>> Also, have you thought about updating your comments in a blog or
>> something re Android from the "Embedded Linux Conference 2013"?  I 
>> find
>> your "Android self-hosting" argument very compelling and interesting 
>> and
>> wonder how you feel about the situation now after a few years have
>> passed since you made that talk.
> 
> Android merged toybox at the start of 2015, it first shipped in 
> Marshmallow:
> 
>   https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/

Will check it out.

> The #2 contributor to toybox is Elliott Hughes, Android's toolbox and
> bionic maintainer, who has committed to replacing toolbox entirely with
> toybox:
> 
> http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-June/008484.html

Ditto.

> He updates the toybox roadmap more often than I do:
> 
>   https://github.com/landley/toybox/commits/master/www/roadmap.html

Ditto again . .

> Alas, I'm the bottleneck on finishing off toolbox, $DAYJOB and life 
> have
> been hugely distracting for the past ~8 months. (Trying to dig out of
> that, but I need to be in San Diego again a week from monday...)

No worries . .

> Still, let's try to track down the failure you're seeing with mkroot. I
> want that to work for everybody. I haven't moved over the environment
> variable whitelisting yet, although it's basically something like:
> 
>   [ ! -z "$TERM" ] && exec env -i "PATH=$PATH" "$0"

Aha!  Before I was running the script in a tmux tab and getting the 
results that I have attached.  I just tried running the line above in 
the tmux tab and the tab disappeared! - so I tried opening a new xterm 
with no tmux and running the script from there and got a different 
result:

toybox-0.7.3/www/
toybox-0.7.3/www/about.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/cleanup.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/code.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/design.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/ext2.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/faq.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/footer.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/header.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/index.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/license.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/news.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/oldnews.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/roadmap.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/status.html
toybox-0.7.3/www/toycans.png
cc -o kconfig/conf kconfig/conf.c kconfig/zconf.tab.c -DKBUILD_NO_NLS=1 
\
	-DPROJECT_NAME=\"ToyBox\"
ccache: error: Could not find compiler "cc" in PATH
kconfig/Makefile:65: recipe for target 'kconfig/conf' failed
make: *** [kconfig/conf] Error 1

> (Modulo "$TERM" being reliably set in the host environment and NOT set
> by magic /etc/profile stuff that runs even for shell scripts. I dunno,
> maybe $USER would be better? Tested to work with my bash on ubuntu !=
> and this won't screw up on some obscure distro like RHELL 9...)

Well not exactly RHELL 9 but still Fedora 25 . . I think the last RH I 
used was 5.2 (ie a still "free" version before RHE).

> P.S. I'm not sure if I should get mkroot a new list, or move this one
> over to a new name. At the moment there's not enough to see to take
> action on either way. Working on it, but juggling 9 other things at the
> same time...

I am in a similar position but I am interested in making more progress 
with this stuff whenever I can so I will just try things whenever you 
have time to look at it and can suggest something.

Regards,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

PO Box 896
Cowra  NSW  2794
Australia
E-mail:  phil at pricom.com.au
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