trusttrust VS live-bootstrap

The Go compiler is written in Go. To "bootstrap", you need Go version 1.4, which had a compiler written in C. Oh, and to bootstrap that, you need GCC, which is a compiler written in C. To bootstrap that, you need a C compiler written in assembly. To bootstrap that, you need to type in your assembler in hex. To bootstrap that, you enter the data for your assembler into memory by flipping switches on the front panel. (Newer computers don't ship with these panels, so you better hope nothing gets corrupted on the way.)

strace is a rather powerfull tool if you want to find out what a certain executable is doing. Which files it is opening, reading and writing and also which other executables it is executing. I personally have not used the '--stack-trace' option yet.

Earlier this year, I have used it to analyze what happens during the initial steps of live-bootstrap [1] and produce a web page with all the information [2]. For this, I wrote a C program to parse and process the output of strace.

[1] https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

[2] https://fransfaase.github.io/Emulator/

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.

Actually you can skip a file system entirely if you do something like stage0 or live-bootstrap https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

See https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap, and https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst has all the steps we take.

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.

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)!