Bootstrap

Disclaimer

As a regular user, you are not expected to bootstrap glaucus from scratch
This process is only intended for developers who are interested in building stages 0 through 3 on their systems
It is important to understand that this process might not always work as your host system and glaucus are moving targets that are hard to pin and while it is likely to work now, it is due to the developers spending most of their time bootstrapping as we have not decided yet on what release to use a seed for future processes; what you mostly use from other distributions is at least stage 2 (see the explanation of stages below) as you are not expected to bootstrap from absolutely nothing and it is highly likely that it’s been ages since anyone attempted to bootstrap a mainstream distribution (even gentoo starts you from stage 2 or 3 as they call it)

Introduction

To bootstrap glaucus is to generate a self-hosting image file capable of rebuilding itself under itself from nothing (or from a minimal seed that may or may not share software with the host system)
rad (glaucus package manager) is the tool used to bootstrap glaucus; some distributions separate the bootstrap logic from the building logic from the package management logic which is understandable, but for the sake of simplicity, rad is responsible for all of this on glaucus
The bootstrap process is divided into 4 stages:
- Toolchain Stage: aka stage 0, in this stage glaucus leverages existing tools on the host system to build a cross-compilation toolchain that will build the next stage; This stage is not optimized as we want to reach the following stage as soon as possible while keeping things sane and reproducible; This stage runs on the host machine and typically should not take more than 15 minutes to complete on a relatively modern system
- Cross Stage: aka stage 1, in this stage glaucus uses the toolchain built in stage 0 to cross-compile the core packages needed to build a basic self-hosting glaucus system; This stage is optimized for x86-64-v3 as it is independant from the host system; This stage runs on the host machine and should typically not take more than 25 minutes to complete on a relatively modern system
- Native Stage: aka stage 2, after a successful build of stage 1, an img file that is bootable under QEMU can be generated using the img script found in glaucus live system bubble, in this stage glaucus is truly on its own, it will attempt to rebuild itself under itself performing a fully offline build (as the img script would have copied the necessary sources needed to perform such build); This stage is optimized for x86-64-v3 and is not run on the host machine but instead under QEMU, the basic packages and some other useful packages are natively build here; and should typically not take more than 45 minutes to complete on a relatively modern system
- Real Native Stage: aka stage 3 (or stage 4 as some distributions that use a 1-based index call it), this stage doesn’t have a full name yet, in this stage you leverage a stage 2 rootfs or iso file to perform a native rebuild of the glaucus system upon installation (think gentoo); This stage is optimized for native and will only run on your machine, it has not been implemented yet as it is closely tied to the install process which is not yet ready, also the previous 3 stages are enough to validate the sanity of the entire process and its artefacts

Host System Requirements

Arch, Fedora and Linux From Scratch (LFS) can be used to bootstrap glaucus
It is recommended to have a minimum of 4 GB of memory and 10 GB of storage space

Required Packages

autoconf
automake
bash
binutils
bison (or byacc)
booster
bzip2
coreutils (or toybox)
diffutils (or toybox)
dosfstools
erofs-utils
findutils (or toybox)
flex (or reflex)
gawk (or mawk)
gcc
gettext (or gettext-tiny)
git
grep
gzip (or pigz)
libcap
libtool (or slibtool)
limine
m4
make
meson (and not muon as it does not support --cross-file)
patch (or toybox)
perl
pkg-config (or pkgconf)
sed (or toybox)
tar (or libarchive)
wget2
xz
zlib (or zlib-ng)
zstd

Steps

Clone the glaucus repository:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/glaucuslinux/glaucus
cd glaucus

Checkout the main branch:

for i in bubble cerata rad s6-boot-scripts; do
  cd $i
  git checkout main
  cd ..
done

Provide missing stubs in case your host system does not provide them (remove texinfo):

for i in gtkdocize help2man makeinfo po4a texi2dvi; do
  sudo cp -fPp cerata/musl/files/true /usr/bin/$i
done

Optional Create symlinks on your host system (assuming you are in glaucus/):

sudo ln -fs $PWD/cerata/autoconf/files/glaucus-configure /usr/bin
sudo ln -fs $PWD/cerata/muon/files/glaucus-meson /usr/bin

sudo mkdir -p \
  /var/cache/rad \
  /var/lib/rad/clusters
sudo ln -fs $PWD/src /var/cache/rad
sudo ln -fs $PWD/cerata /var/lib/rad/clusters

Bootstrap toolchain and cross (use nimble to build rad):

cd rad
./rad bootstrap toolchain
./rad bootstrap cross

Create the cross img:

cd bubble
sudo ./img

Boot via QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -machine q35,accel=kvm \
  -cpu host \
  -smp 4 \
  -m 4G \
  -name glaucus \
  -drive file=glaucus-*.img,format=raw \
  -nic model=e1000 \
  -display gtk,gl=on \
  -vga qxl \
  -rtc base=localtime \
  -bios /usr/share/ovmf/x64/OVMF.4m.fd

Bootstrap native (use cross-compiled rad):

rad bootstrap native

Create the native iso:

cd bubble
sudo ./iso