| 5 Sep 2024 |
 js | Hm, if all you want is the kernel and a busybox, I'm not so sure | 22:22:16 |
 aaron | In reply to @js:nil.im
That is, if you mean the kernel. With NetBSD, you get the entire system, true. I know this is the BSD channel, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean pivoting to a full operating system, not just a kernel. ;) | 22:22:34 |
| aaron | Even if they pick something simple like LFS. | 22:22:50 |
| js | I think from the complexity perspective, it might be roughly similar. But from the effort needed perspective, I agree that NetBSD might be nicer, as you don't just end up with a kernel + busybox, but a full system, an ISO even that you can compare to the official ones and call it done. | 22:23:37 |
| js | Like, once you reproduced an ISO after all this trouble, you know that ISO is fine and from now on can use that | 22:23:58 |
| js | reproducing an entire Linux distro is gonna be much harder | 22:24:09 |
| js | But yeah, now that I think of it, ./build.sh is really one of the unique features of NetBSD. I'm not aware of any other OS that has that. | 22:24:39 |
| aaron | I may be giving the netbsd kernel a little too much credit here and linux too little. I don't believe the linux kernel has a hard dependency on gcc anymore and I assumed that the netbsd kernel can still be compiled by something like pcc or tcc. | 22:25:43 |
| js | (also I'm quite surprised reproducibility has been achieved in 2017 already. That's early!) | 22:25:46 |
| js | In reply to @aaron:matrix.org
I may be giving the netbsd kernel a little too much credit here and linux too little. I don't believe the linux kernel has a hard dependency on gcc anymore and I assumed that the netbsd kernel can still be compiled by something like pcc or tcc. It doesn't really matter much, because the bootstrap project got to GCC 🙂 | 22:26:14 |
| aaron | It's been ages in openbsd land since the openbsd kernel could be built with pcc. Maybe the x86_64 one. | 22:26:24 |
| js | I mean, for starters, OpenBSD can only be built from OpenBSD | 22:26:41 |
| js | and sometimes even only from OpenBSD snapshotos | 22:26:46 |
| js | * and sometimes even only from OpenBSD snapshots | 22:26:47 |
| aaron | In reply to @js:nil.im
It doesn't really matter much, because the bootstrap project got to GCC 🙂 Yea fair, the work is already done. Maybe some internet complaints about auditing gcc, but such is the internet. | 22:26:53 |
| js | hm, now that I think about it, OpenBSD is probably among the more hostile OSes to bootstrap | 22:27:30 |
| js | officially supported is only "if you want to build current, download a snapshot and compile it", right? | 22:27:48 |
| js | so that's similar to rust where you can only build rust N with rust N-1 | 22:28:11 |
| js | how is the situation on FreeBSD? | 22:28:27 |
| aaron | Unfortunately I know nearly anything about freebsd, but you're right on the openbsd front. They don't really care about cross-compiling, although the work to go from a release to the latest snapshot is fairly minimal. There's not that many breaking changes every 6 months. | 22:29:30 |
| js | Yeah, I think it's one of those "usually it works but if it doesn't you are on your own, you were supposed to use the latest snapshot" | 22:29:59 |
| js | it's probably only when there are breaking changes in -current compared to the last release | 22:30:26 |
| aaron | I think it more falls in to the bucket of "if you're able to bootstrap a new architecture, you can probably git bisect this in less than an hour". | 22:30:43 |
| js | anyway, NetBSD is actually a really interesting target for such a bootstrapping project. Which makes you wonder why they didn't consider it. | 22:31:21 |
| aaron | I'd assume the standard answers to that. Most familiar with linux and the most popular thing to farm internet points. | 22:31:48 |
| js | Probably. | 22:31:59 |
| aaron | I'd also be surprised if they didn't consider it and discard it for non-technical reasons. | 22:32:26 |
| aaron | I would have loved to see a BSD project mentioned for "marketing reasons", but I also do agree with their choice of linux. And equally if they can do this for linux, someone motivated should be able to rather easily make the same thing happen for BSD-land. | 22:34:41 |
| 6 Sep 2024 |
| js | aaron: I mean, it's nice they did it for Linux, because that means it just works for NetBSD as well 😉 | 06:07:09 |
| js | and if you can cross-compile an OS from another OS, Linux is most likely an OS you can compile it from | 06:07:24 |
