Compiling programs for RedoxOS

Source

This writting is based on https://github.com/redox-os/redox/tree/0eba99659e6ef9d2184e64eaee045c4a720132db version.

Currently it's quite easy to get your program to be compiled and shipped together with Redox OS. All you need to do is:

  1. list your program in filesystem.toml

  2. create recipe.sh in cookbook/recipes/hello-world:

    $ mkdir cookbook/recipes/hello-world
$ echo "GIT=https://github.com/povilasb/redox-hello-world" > cookbook/recipes/hello-world/recipe.sh

  3. build redox:

    $ make
$ make qemu

The problem with this approach is that every time I make a change to my program I have to recompile the whole OS and restart qemu. It takes time!

I cannot compile rust programs inside Redox yet. Although the progress is there: https://www.reddit.com/r/Redox/comments/6h4qm9/rustc/ Thus what I want is to cross compile my program and ship it to Redox OS.

Compiling Redox programs

Redox build system is based on so called cookbook. Which basically is a bunch of shell scripts. I can use this cookbook to build my programs for Redox.

Let's say my program source code is located in /home/povilas/projects/redox-hello-world and Redox in /home/povilas/projects/redox. I have to register my program in cookbook:

$ cd ~/projects/redox/cookbook
$ mkdir recipes/hello-world
$ echo "GIT=file:///home/povilas/projects/redox-hello-world" > recipes/hello-world/recipe.sh

Building for the first time

There's a slight difference when I'm building for the first and N-th time. In case when the program was never built I have to initiate it inside the cookbook:

$ cd ~/projects/redox/cookbook
$ ./repo.sh hello-world

This command will fetch the sources from git and build them.

Rebuilding

When the program was already built, I have to use another script from cookbook:

$ cd ~/projects/redox/cookbook
$ ./cook.sh hello-world build

One issue with this approach is that if I don't commit my changes to hello-world repo, they will not be refetched by cook.sh. A workaround is to create a symbolic link to hello-world program sources in cookbook build dir:

$ cd ~/projects/redox/cookbook/recipes/hello-world/build
$ ln -s ~/projects/redox-hello-world/src src

Now "./cook.sh hello-world build" will always rebuild the changes.

Transfer program to Redox

When I develop and experiment, I run Redox inside qemu. Currently the easiest way to transfer the built program to Redox is to wget it from Redox itself.

  1. start HTTP server in you host machine:

    $ cd ~/projects/redox/cookbook/recipes/hello-world/build/target/x86_64-unknown-redox/release
$ python3 -m http.server

  2. download the built program inside Redox:

    $ wget http://10.0.2.2:8000/hello_world hello_world
$ chmod 0755 hello_world
$ ./hello_world

10.0.2.2 is the default gateway address in qemu (http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking#User_Networking_.28SLIRP.29). 8000 is default port for python based HTTP server.

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