Michael Walker

Arch Hurd is bootable!

January 16, 2010 at 10:40pm Tagged: arch hurd, hurd and milestone, with 0 Comments

Arch Hurd has hit a big milestone, it can be booted! We can all bask in microkernally, if not particularly Archy yet, goodness. Now we need to improve our bootable environment (it has no config files, /dev is empty, et cetera) and start work on a toolchain, autotools, pacman, and all the other things we need to build packages. Currently, it's a pretty useless system—but not for long :)

Building

Firstly we need to build Arch Hurd with Allan's crosshurd scripts:

mkdir hurd
wget http://repo.archhurd.org/crosshurd/crosshurd-20100116.tar.gz
tar xvf crosshurd-20100116.tar.gz

# You might need to edit ./scripts/prepare first.

source ./scripts/makeall

mkdir $HURD_DIR/servers
touch $HURD_DIR/servers/exec
mkdir $HURD_DIR/servers/socket

mkdir $HURD_DIR/tmp
chmod 1777 $HURD_DIR/tmp

Now you can either install to a partition or to a virtual hard disk for use with a virtualisation program such as qemu. GNU Mach doesn't support SATA drives yet, so I opted for qemu:

# Create the image
qemu-img create -f raw hurd.img 1GB

# Make and format partition
losetup /dev/loop0 hurd.img
fdisk /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0
# partition should start at sector 63. Check with fdist -ul hurd.img
losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 hurd.img
mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -I 128 -o hurd -F /dev/loop0

# mount image
mkdir $ROOT/mnt
mount -o loop /dev/loop0 /mnt

# Then, build hurd and copy to /mnt
cp -a /path/to/hurd /mnt

# Unmount
umount /mnt
losetup -d /dev/loop0

# Download a grub boot image
wget http://www.dolda2000.com/~fredrik/grub.img

# Note: Networking doesn't seem to work in qemu 0.12.1, downgrade to 0.11.1
qemu -boot a -fda grub.img -hda hurd.img -net nic,vlan=1 -net user,vlan=1

And now, you have a minimally bootable Hurd system.

After booting

I imagine one of the first things you'll notice is the complaint about the lack of /dev/console. So, let's set up some devices.

settrans -c /servers/socket/1 /hurd/pflocal
cd /dev
./MAKEDEV console null zero time hd0 hd0s1

And, you have no config files. Let's start to create those:

echo "/dev/hd0s1 / ext2 defaults 1 1" > /etc/fstab
echo "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash" > /etc/passwd

If you opted for qemu, we can also set up the network at this point:

settrans -afgp /servers/socket/2 /hurd/pfinet -i eth0 -a 10.0.2.15 -g 10.0.2.2 -m 255.255.255.0
echo "nameserver 10.0.2.3" > /etc/resolv.conf

Extra Software

I have started writing build scripts for extra software, so first set the appropriate *_VER= lines in your ./scripts/prepare file:

SED_VER=4.2.1
NCURSES_VER=5.7
NANO_VER=2.2.1

sed

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2 ]; then
  wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf sed-$SED_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2

rm -rf sed-build
mkdir -p sed-build
cd sed-build

../sed-$SED_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT

ncurses

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz ]; then
  wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf ncurses-$NCURSES_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz

rm -rf ncurses-build
mkdir -p ncurses-build
cd ncurses-build

../ncurses-$NCURSES_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --mandir=/usr/share/man
  --with-shared \
  --with-normal \
  --without-debug \
  --without-ada \
  --enable-widec

make
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT

nano

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz ]; then
  wget http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf nano-$NANO_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz

rm -rf nano-build
mkdir -p nano-build
cd nano-build

../nano-$NANO_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --sysconfdir=/etc \
  --enable-color \
  --enable-nanorc \
  --enable-multibuffer \
  --disable-wrapping-as-root

make
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT