ladybird/Documentation/BuildInstructions.md

SerenityOS build instructions

Prerequisites

Linux prerequisites

Make sure you have all the dependencies installed:

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install build-essential cmake curl libmpfr-dev libmpc-dev libgmp-dev e2fsprogs qemu-system-i386 qemu-utils

Fedora

sudo dnf install curl cmake mpfr-devel libmpc-devel gmp-devel e2fsprogs @"C Development Tools and Libraries" @Virtualization

Arch Linux / Manjaro

sudo pacman -S base-devel cmake curl mpfr libmpc gmp e2fsprogs qemu qemu-arch-extra

Ensure your gcc version is >= 8 with gcc --version. Otherwise, install it (on Ubuntu) with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get install gcc-9 g++-9
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-9 900 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-9

Ensure your CMake version is >= 3.16 with cmake --version. If your system doesn't provide a suitable version of CMake, you can download a binary release from the CMake website.

macOS prerequisites

Make sure you have all the dependencies installed:

brew install coreutils
brew tap discoteq/discoteq
brew install flock
brew install qemu
brew install e2fsprogs
brew install m4
brew install autoconf
brew install libtool
brew install automake
brew install bash
brew cask install osxfuse
Toolchain/BuildFuseExt2.sh

Notes:

• fuse-ext2 is not available as brew formula so it must be installed using BuildFuseExt2.sh
• Xcode and xcode-tools must be installed (git is required by some scripts)
• coreutils is needed to build gcc cross compiler
• flock command can also be installed with brew install util-linux but in that case you will need to add it to $PATH
• qemu is needed to run the compiled OS image. You can also build it using the BuildQemu.sh script
• osxfuse, e2fsprogs, m4, autoconf, automake, libtool and BuildFuseExt2.sh are needed if you want to build the root filesystem disk image natively on macOS. This allows mounting an EXT2 fs and also installs commands like mke2fs that are not available on stock macOS.
• bash is needed because the default version installed on macOS doesn't support globstar
• If you install some commercial EXT2 macOS fs handler instead of osxfuse and fuse-ext2, you will need to brew install e2fsprogs to obtain mke2fs anyway.

OpenBSD prerequisites

pkg_add bash gmp gcc git flock gmake sudo

FreeBSD prerequisites

$ pkg add coreutils gmake bash sudo git

Build

Before starting, make sure that you have configured your global identity for git, or the first script will fail after running for a bit.

Go into the Toolchain/ directory and run the BuildIt.sh script:

$ cd Toolchain
$ ./BuildIt.sh

Building the toolchain will also automatically create a Build/ directory for the build to live in, and build cmake inside that directory.

Once the toolchain and cmake have been built, go into the Build/ directory and run the make and make install commands:

$ cd ..
$ cd Build
$ make
$ make install

This will compile all of SerenityOS and install the built files into Root/ inside the build tree. make install actually pulls in the regular make (make all) automatically, so there isn't really a need to run it explicitly. You may also want ask make to build things in parallel by using -j, optionally specifying the maximum number of jobs to run.

Now to build a disk image, run make image, and if nothing breaks too much, take it for a spin by using make run.

$ make image
$ make run

Note that the anon user is able to become root without password by default, as a development convenience. To prevent this, remove anon from the wheel group and he will no longer be able to run /bin/su.

On Linux, QEMU is significantly faster if it's able to use KVM. The run script will automatically enable KVM if /dev/kvm exists and is readable+writable by the current user.

Bare curious users may even consider sourcing suitable hardware to install Serenity on a physical PC.

Later on, when you git pull to get the latest changes, there's no need to rebuild the toolchain. You can simply run make install, make image, make run again. CMake will only rebuild those parts that have been updated.

You may also want to replace make with ninja in the above commands for some additional build speed benefits. To do this, go to an empty directory at the root and call cmake .. -G Ninja inside that directory. You might either create a new directory or reuse the existing Build directory after cleaning it.

Ports

To add a package from the ports collection to Serenity, for example curl, go into Ports/curl/ and run ./package.sh. The sourcecode for the package will be downloaded and the package will be built. After that, run make image from the Build/ directory to update the disk image. The next time you start Serenity with make run, curl will be available.