[GSoC 2014: ARM port] Week #1 and #2

Sometime in the middle of last week, PulkoMandy managed to successfully built the bootstrap image of ARM with some changes that can’t be committed(yet). This is significant progress since the ARM bootstrap image wouldn’t build successfully 2 weeks ago. I’ve managed to apply those changes and build the bootstrap image successfully. The steps for building have been specified below.

kallisti5 managed to make some progress on the booting the ARM port front but issues with floating point instructions keep coming up which prevent progress. He has been very helpful by providing a lot of information on how to reproduce what he’s done and also listed out what should probably be the next few steps[1].

The next step is to manually create an SD card image from which qemu can boot the haiku kernel. While this may not be realistically possible in one week, I hope to get the bootloader working at least before I have to temporarily pause work on this owing to exams.

Steps to create a bootstrap image

1. Obtain the source files

Download the haiku source and buildtools as outlined in [2].

$ git clone https://git.haiku-os.org/buildtools
$ git clone https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku

Also download the haikuports, haikuporter and haikuports.cross sources.

$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports.git
$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuporter.git
$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports.cross.git

2. Specifying existence of few packages which don’t really exist to enable building of ARM port

Apply the following diff to the haiku source tree.

diff --git a/build/jam/repositories/HaikuPorts/arm b/build/jam/repositories/HaikuPorts/arm
index 6cee1a2..f255a36 100644
--- a/build/jam/repositories/HaikuPorts/arm
+++ b/build/jam/repositories/HaikuPorts/arm
@@ -11,7 +11,17 @@ RemotePackageRepository HaikuPorts
        :
        # repository architecture packages
        # primary architecture (arm)
-
+       curl-7.36.0-1
+       curl_devel-7.36.0-1
+       freetype-2.5.2-2
+       freetype_devel-2.5.2-2
+       gawk-4.1.0-2
+       icu-4.8.1.1-4
+       icu_devel-4.8.1.1-4
+       libsolv-0.3.0_haiku_2013_10_01-1
+       libsolv_devel-0.3.0_haiku_2013_10_01-1
+       zlib-1.2.8-4
+       zlib_devel-1.2.8-4
        :
 
        # source packages

3. Applying patches to enable building on Debian based distros

I use Kubuntu and had to apply the changes specified in the commit[3].

4. Building the bootstrap image

Run the following commands within the haiku source tree.

$ mkdir generated.arm
$ cd generated.arm
$ ../configure --cross-tools-source ../../buildtools --build-cross-tools arm --include-gpl-addons --include-patented-code --use-gcc-pipe -j2 --bootstrap ../../haikuporter/haikuporter ../../haikuports.cross/ ../../haikuports --target-board beagle
$ jam -q @bootstrap-raw

If multiple processors/cores are available, use -qjX for faster compilation. Compilation can fail at times if this option is specified in which case simply drop the option and try again.

1. https://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-gsoc/Booting-the-bootstrap-image-is-it-possible,12
2. /guides/building/get-source-git
3. http://bb.haikuports.org/haikuports.cross/commits/4287814086470ad7f6869150edf691b843aba6d8/raw/