bootstrap-seeds
nixpkgs
bootstrap-seeds | nixpkgs | |
---|---|---|
6 | 976 | |
73 | 15,844 | |
- | 3.4% | |
5.2 | 10.0 | |
5 months ago | 5 days ago | |
Assembly | Nix | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
bootstrap-seeds
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NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal ISO successfully independently rebuilt
This[0] is basically the hand-documentation of those bytes then. Handwritten ELF header and assembly code.
[0] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...
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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes
The bootstrap seed, https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX..., is a tiny interpreter that takes a much larger program written in a special-purpose, bytecode-based language. This proceeds in turn once or twice more--special purpose program generating another interpreter for another special-purpose language--until you end up with a minimal Scheme interpreter, which then can be used to execute a C compiler program.
All of this is incredible work, but a minimal C-subset compiler in under 512 bytes seems like a unique achievement.
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Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust (Turing Award Lecture)
There is also live-bootstrap which uses a similar bootstrap chain to Guix (stage0 -> Mes -> tcc -> gcc), but without needing Guile/guix-daemon binaries etc. The whole thing starts with just a 357-byte binary seed (source)!
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Zig is now self–hosted by default
Yeah, it's a binary blob, but it's small enough to be easily auditable. Anyone with some knowledge of x86 assembly can read the annotated version [1] and verify that it does what it claims (which is to convert ASCII hex with comments into binary).
You're right, it also requires a Linux kernel, and of course, you also have to trust the hardware you're running it on. Still, it reduces the amount of stuff we have to take for granted as trusted, which I think is a good thing. (I'm not involved in the project, just an admirer).
[1]: https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/b09a8b8cbcb6...
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stage0-posix was ported to RISC-V
stage0-posix just gained initial support for RISC-V (64-bit). It starts with 392 byte hex assembler, 361 byte "shell" and bootstraps simple linker (hex2), macro assembler (M0). Then it builds cc_riscv64 RISC-V compiler written in RISC-V assembly and uses it to build simple C compiler written in C (M2-Planet). Then it builds a few extra utilities (cp, mkdir, untar, ungz, sha256sum, chmod)
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Reproducibility
From a security point of view the only thing that gentoo users need to achieve similar levels of security is a bootstrapped compiler from a known good seed. The source code is already deterministic by definition. After that all you need is a compiler bootstrapped via something like https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds which can be independently verified. It would probably be useful to be able to have independent bootstraps arrive at the same binary output for a compiler, but probably only as an option. Ultimately way less work for the same level of security.
nixpkgs
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Tracexec: TUI for tracing execve and pre-exec behavior
This will drop you into a shell where `tracexec` is installed.
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/310158
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Nix: The Breaking Point
I don't think so. The article is probably intended for the Nix community, so the author doesn't need to convince HN that something is going on. If as an outsider you are interested then you need to look into it yourself, the community has no obligation to make their internal conflicts legible to the outside world.
As an outsider myself, it certainly looks like something is going on as more than 20 Nixpkg maintainers left in a week: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=label%3A%228.has%3...
- Maintainers Leaving
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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset
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Eelco Dolstra's leadership is corrosive to the Nix project
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup
For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...
For example,
```
- NixOS/nixpkgs: There isn't a clear canonical way to refer to a specific package
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NixOS Is Not Reproducible
Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...
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The xz attack shell script
I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...
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Debian Git Monorepo
NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.
I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.
Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
What are some alternatives?
live-bootstrap - Use of a Linux initramfs to fully automate the bootstrapping process
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
zig-bootstrap - take off every zig
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
bcc - bcc is a b compiler
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
stage0-posix-x86
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
turning-polyglot-solutions-into-t
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
mescc-tools-seed - A place for public review of the posix port of stage0
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.