Building a Hosted Inferno Environment

Inferno can be built as either a native operating system, running directly on hardware, or as an environment that is hosted by another operating system. Although we want to build a native version of Inferno, we need to build a hosted environment in order to prepare the resources needed by a native version.

We refer to the native version of Inferno as the target and the machine we use to compile it as the host.

Fetching build dependencies

When building on Debian GNU/Linux, some development packages will need to be installed. In addition, amd64 architecture hosts need to enable multiarch and i386 support. This can be done with the following commands:

#!bash

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update
apt-get install multiarch-support libc6-dev-i386 libx11-dev:i386 libxext-dev:i386

This enables a 32-bit build of the hosted environment to be compiled and run on the host.

Configuring the Hosted Build

At the command line, enter the inferno-os directory. The mkconfig file contains information about the host and the target, such as the processor architecture and the location of the root of the sources. Since we will initially create a hosted environment, we define the architectures to be the same. For example, when compiling under GNU/Linux on i386 or amd64, replace the original definitions for ROOT, SYSHOST and OBJTYPE in the mkconfig file with the following:

#!bash

# In the mkconfig file:
ROOT=$INFERNO_ROOT
SYSHOST=$SYSHOST
OBJTYPE=$OBJTYPE

We can now, from the inferno-os directory, build the mk tool for the host with these commands:

#!bash

export INFERNO_ROOT=$PWD
export SYSHOST=Linux
export OBJTYPE=386
./makemk.sh

This should produce lots of compiler output but, if successful, finish with the following message:

mk binary built successfully!

We can now build the environment, but first we need to ensure that the mk tool we have created can be found during the build. From the same inferno-os directory as before, run the following commands:

#!bash

export PATH=$INFERNO_ROOT/$SYSHOST/$OBJTYPE/bin:$PATH
sed -i s/'-fno-aggressive-loop-optimizations'// mkfiles/mkfile-$SYSHOST-$OBJTYPE
mkdir Inferno/$OBJTYPE/lib
mk install

#!bash

cp -r usr/inferno usr/$USER
mkdir tmp

Now you can test it by running the following command:

#!bash

emu 'wm/wm'

This should open a window showing Inferno's graphical environment which you can explore if you like. Simply close the window when you are finished.

Creating a separate installation

It can be confusing to have all the source directories in the root directory of the hosted environment. To resolve this, run the make-install-root.sh script script, passing the locations of the inferno-os directory and the new directory that will host the environment, as in the following example:

#!bash

make-install-root.sh $INFERNO_ROOT hosted

You can now use the new installation with this command:

#!bash

emu -r hosted 'wm/wm'

#!bash

emu -r hosted

This environment can be used to prepare resources that will be included in a native Inferno build.