Blog

Unlocking Moss

Feb 9, 2021 - 3 min read - 486 words

Wait, what? Another blog post? In the same WEEK? Yeah totally doing that now. So, this is just another devlog update but there have been some interesting updates that we’d like to share.

LDC present in the bootstrap

Thanks to some awesome work from Peter, we now have LDC (The LLVM D Lang Compiler) present in the stage3 bootstrap. To simplify the process we use the official binary release of LDC to bootstrap LDC for Serpent OS.

In turn, this has allowed us to get to a point where we can now build moss and boulder within stage3. This is super important, as we’ll use the stage3 chroot and boulder to produce the binary packages that create stage4.

Some patching has taken place to prevent using ld.gold and instead use lld to integrate with our toolchain decisions.

A wild LDC appears

Cleanups Complete

Feb 8, 2021 - 2 min read - 308 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

Well, we’re officially back to working around the clock. After spending some time optimising my workflow, I’ve been busy getting the entire codebase cleaned up, so we can begin working towards an MVP.

Lots and lots of work

Codebase hygiene

Since Friday, I’ve been working extensively on cleaning up the codebase for the following projects:

boulder
moss
moss-core
moss-format

As it now stands, 1 lint issue (a non-issue, really) exists across all 4 projects. A plethora of issues have been resolved, ranging from endian correctness in the format to correct idiomatic D-lang integration and module naming.

Bored

Granted, cleanups aren’t all that sexy. Peter has been updating many parts of the bootstrap project, introducing systemd 247.3, LLVM 11.0.1, etc. We now have all 3 stages building correctly again for the x86_64 target.

Build System Functional

Oct 11, 2020 - 3 min read - 462 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

Wow, has it been a hectic few weeks, and it definitely shows: last time we blogged it was about re-bootstrapping with glibc. Feels like ancient news already! So, what’s new in the world of Serpent OS? Apart from yours truly now being proud parent to a beautiful baby girl, work has resumed on the development of Moss, our package manager. And it builds stuff. Awesomely. Let’s quickly catch up with those updates and see where we’re headed next.

Look at all the buildiness

It lives!

We’re now able to build the majority of a moss package. Notice I’ve made a distinction there. So, we’re able to run the build instructions, and use all the metadata, configuration and macros available. The only thing we’re not actually doing is dumping the built files into a binary package.

We’re able to do the build-system part rather well, now. Right now we support the following features in the build system:

Multiple, profile-based architecture support
Automatic -m32 profile based cross compilation support for 32-bit libraries on 64-bit OS
Basic Profile Guided Optimisation via the workload key. Set a workload, optimise accordingly.
LLVM Context Sensitive Profile Guided Optimisation. This is default for LLVM with the workload key, and comes for free, with multiple build stages.
Profile based tuning options, such as optimize for speed, size, disabling hardening, etc.
Trivially switch between gnu and llvm toolchain in stone.yml, with profiles knowing the right flags to use with tuning options.
Recursive macro support in build scripts, defined on per-profile level
Architecture specific profiles support in stone.yml, i.e. profiles -> aarch64 -> setup: to avoid if/else spaghetti.

Results Of The Experiment

Sep 22, 2020 - 4 min read - 768 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

It seems like only yesterday we announced to the world a Great Experiment. It was in fact 2 months ago, and a whole lot of work has happened since that point. A few take-homes are immediately clear, the primary one being the need to be a community-oriented Linux distribution.

To quote ourselves 2 months ago:

If the experiment is a success, which of course means having tight controls on scope and timescale, then one would assume the primary way to use Serpent OS would be through some downstream repackaging or reconfiguration, i.e. basing upon the project, to meet specific user demand.

It turns out that so far the experiment has been successful, and being forkable is still at the very heart of our goals. Others have joined us on our journey, and expressed the same passion in our goals as we have. A community has formed around the project, with individuals sharing the same ambitions for a reliable, rolling operating system with a powerful package manager.

Toolchain bootstrap

Source Format Defined

Sep 21, 2020 - 3 min read - 365 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

Following quickly on the heels of yesterday’s announcement that the binary format has been defined, we’ve now implemented the initial version of our source format. The source format provides metadata on a package along with instructions on how to build the package.

The next step of course, is to implement the build tool, converting the source specification into a binary package that the end user can install. With our 2 formats defined, we can now go ahead and implement the build routines.

Very trivial package recipe

A YAML based format

The eagle-eyed among you will already see this is a derivation of the package.yml format I originally created while at Solus. Minor adaptations to the format have been made to support multiple architectures via the profiles key, and package splitting behaviour has now been grouped under a packages key to make the structure more readable.

In package.yml, one would have to redefine subpackage summaries as a key in a list of the primary summary key, such as:

    rundeps:
        - primary-run-dep
        - dev: secondary-run-dep
    summary:
        - Some Summary
        - dev: Some different summary

We’ve opted to group “Package Definition” behaviour into core structs, which are allowed to appear in the root-level package and subpackages:

    summary: Top-level summary
    packages:
        - dev:
            summary: Different summary
            rundeps: Different rundeps