AROS: Self-Compile Bounty Almost Completed

Stanislaw Szymczyk has been working on the AROS self-compiling bounty since April. The job, according to its website, has been not a trivial task. Now that some issues with soft links and the SFS file format have been resolved, the job is almost finished.

First of all, the Linux-hosted version of AROS was not working on AMD64 hardware so he had to fix it as much as possible in the kernel and other packages such as the TCP/IP stack, zune/MUI, and the AHI sound system. This was just the beginning.

After that, lots of work,as Stanislaw itself writes:

It’s kind of funny fact that AROS being an AmigaOS-related system needs almost the whole GNU world to compile: not only gcc, make and binutils, but also coreutils, findutils, sed, bison/yacc, awk and more. AROS build system is quite complicated and to make things worse some packages have their own custom tools. For example there’s a Perl-based sfdc tool required to compile AHI. There are also a few Python scripts used in the build system.

The tools ported or modified by Stanislaw also include:

• A new static Python port
• Modifications to the POSIX compatibility layer of AROS implementing functions such as vfork() wait() and waitpid() and a nwe pipe handler in order to have a new Perl port
• An Autotools port
• A new version of Make using the new process management functions ported above

So far, the compilation is executed in RAM while Stanislaw is working on fixing dos.library in order to handle soft links correctly under SFS.

Stanislaw has prepared an AROS self-compilation live demo CD including all the ported tools and other programs needed to compile other open source programs (AROS itself included). Some notes about the CD, written by Stanislaw:

Currently you can use this Live CD to build AROS, Perl and Python in RAM Disk. Sources and patches are already included on CD. You will need at least 256 MB of RAM to build Perl or Python and at least 512 MB to build AROS.

Building Perl or Python takes about half an hour on VMware Player running on Opteron 270 (2 x 2GHz). Complete AROS build takes about 6 hours in VMware Player running on the same hardware. Building AROS on real hardware takes about 4 hours on Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2.3GHz (reported by Nikolaos Tomatsidis).