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nixpkgs/maintainers/scripts/bootstrap-files/README.md

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Bootstrap files

Currently nixpkgs builds most of it's packages using bootstrap seed binaries (without the reliance on external inputs):

  • bootstrap-tools: an archive with the compiler toolchain and other helper tools enough to build the rest of the nixpkgs.
  • initial binaries needed to unpack bootstrap-tools.*. On linux it's just busybox, on darwin it is unpack.nar.xz which contains the binaries and script needed to unpack the tools. These binaries can be executed directly from the store.

These are called "bootstrap files".

Bootstrap files should always be fetched from hydra and uploaded to tarballs.nixos.org to guarantee that all the binaries were built from the code committed into nixpkgs repository.

The uploads to tarballs.nixos.org are done by @lovesegfault today.

This document describes the procedure of updating bootstrap files in nixpkgs.

How to request the bootstrap seed update

To get the tarballs updated let's use an example i686-unknown-linux-gnu target:

  1. Create a local update:

    $ maintainers/scripts/bootstrap-files/refresh-tarballs.bash --commit --targets=i686-unknown-linux-gnu

  2. Test the update locally. I'll build local hello derivation with the result:

    $ nix-build -A hello --argstr system i686-linux

    To validate cross-targets binfmt NixOS helper can be useful. For riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix entry would be boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "riscv64-linux" ].

  3. Propose the commit as a PR to update bootstrap tarballs, tag people who can help you test the updated architecture and once reviewed tag @lovesegfault to upload the tarballs.

Bootstrap files job definitions

There are two types of bootstrap files:

  • natively built stdenvBootstrapTools.build hydra jobs in nixpkgs:trunk jobset. Incomplete list of examples is:

    • aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.nix
    • i686-unknown-linux-gnu.nix

    These are Tier 1 hydra platforms.

  • cross-built by bootstrapTools.build hydra jobs in nixpkgs:cross-trunk jobset. Incomplete list of examples is:

    • mips64el-unknown-linux-gnuabi64.nix
    • mips64el-unknown-linux-gnuabin32.nix
    • mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu.nix
    • powerpc64le-unknown-linux-gnu.nix
    • riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu.nix

    These are usually Tier 2 and lower targets.

The .build job contains /on-server/ subdirectory with binaries to be uploaded to tarballs.nixos.org. The files are uploaded to tarballs.nixos.org by writers to S3 store.