stage0
live-bootstrap
stage0 | live-bootstrap | |
---|---|---|
22 | 28 | |
888 | 264 | |
- | - | |
3.9 | 9.4 | |
3 months ago | 4 days ago | |
Assembly | Shell | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
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.
stage0
- Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
- Stage0: A minimal bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC
- Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig
- Stage0 – A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries
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Nixpacks takes a source directory and produces an OCI compliant image
Somewhat tangential, but I'm curious how big the bootstrap seed for Nix is. That is, if you wanted to build the entire world, what's a minimum set of binaries you'd need?
Guix has put quite a bit of work into this, AFAIU, and it's getting close to being bootstrappable all the way from stage0 [0]. Curious if some group is also working on similar things for Nix.
[0]:https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
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"Do you believe that every upstream project... is examined by an expert who can accurately identify whether said project contains malware...?"
https://www.bootstrappable.org/ has some good info. Reading the source of https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 is also very enlightening. It's set its goal to be understandable by 70% of programmers.
- Stage0 - A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries
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Common libraries and data structures for C
Even if they aren't, people absolutely should be able to bootstrap new platforms from scratch. It's important to have confidence in our tools, in our ability to rebuild from scratch, and to be safe against the "trusting trust" attack among other things.
Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:
https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.
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How To Build an Evil Compiler
One countermeasure not mentioned here is bootstrapping a compiler with a program small enough to be manually verified. The stage0 project is under 1KB (small enough that the binary can be, and has been, manually checked against the hand written assembly), and GNU Guix (a system for reproducible, isolated builds) is currently working on moving it's bootstrap speed to stage0. That means that, fairly soon, there will be a large set of software that doesn't have a connection to an original C compiler.
- A minimal C compiler in x86 assembly
live-bootstrap
- Bored? How about trying a Linux speedrun? (2020)
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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes
Not using this, but tangentially related is (full disclosure, i am a maintainer of this project) live-bootstrap, which uses about a KB of binary to do a full "Linux from scratch" style thing - read https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... for all 143 steps you have to go through to get there.
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Saving Knowledge Post-Collapse
Actually you can skip a file system entirely if you do something like stage0 or live-bootstrap https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap
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Every night
See https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap, and https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst has all the steps we take.
- Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig
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what is the smallest linux system capable of building itself?
live-bootstrap builds a variety of intermediate systems, starting from a <1KB binary seed (kernel excluded). Check parts.rst for a description, it's kinda wild just how many C and C subset compilers get compiled... but the end result is a system with musl and GCC 4.7, from which building the latest GCC is 2 steps away.
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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)!
- Collapsing Internet
- Zig is now self–hosted by default
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GHC blog: Migrating from Make to Hadrian (for packagers)
There's some cool stuff being done in this area. For example, live-bootstrap goes from a tiny, auditable binary seed to a full GNU userland using only source code (and a Linux kernel).
What are some alternatives?
rizin - UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset.
nix-ld - Run unpatched dynamic binaries on NixOS
arocc - A C compiler written in Zig.
guix - Read-only mirror of GNU Guix — pull requests are ignored, see https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/en/guix.html#Submitting-Patches instead
chibicc - A small C compiler
mescc-tools-seed - A place for public review of the posix port of stage0
libcperciva - BSD-licensed C99/POSIX library code shared between tarsnap, scrypt, kivaloo, spiped, and bsdiff.
brainfuck-x86-64 - A brainfuck interpreter written in x86-64 assembly
bug - Scala 2 bug reports only. Please, no questions — proper bug reports only.
M2-Planet - The PLAtform NEutral Transpiler
c4 - C in four functions