*** note NOTE: The Fuchsia source includes Zircon. See Fuchsia's Getting Started doc. Follow this doc to work on only Zircon.
The Zircon Git repository is located at: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon
To clone the repository, assuming you setup the $SRC variable in your environment:
git clone https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon $SRC/zircon
For the purpose of this document, we will assume that Zircon is checked out in $SRC/zircon and that we will build toolchains, QEMU, etc alongside that. Various make invocations are presented with a "-j32" option for parallel make. If that's excessive for the machine you're building on, try -j16 or -j8.
On Ubuntu this should obtain the necessary pre-reqs:
sudo apt-get install texinfo libglib2.0-dev autoconf libtool bison libsdl-dev build-essential
Install the Xcode Command Line Tools:
xcode-select --install
Install the other pre-reqs:
- Using Homebrew:
brew install wget pkg-config glib autoconf automake libtool
- Using MacPorts:
port install autoconf automake libtool libpixman pkgconfig glib2
If you're developing on Linux or macOS, there are prebuilt toolchain binaries avaiable. Just run this script from your Zircon working directory:
./scripts/download-prebuilt
If you would like to build the toolchains yourself, follow the instructions later in the document.
Build results will be in $SRC/zircon/build-{arm64,x64}
The variable $BUILDDIR in examples below refers to the build output directory for the particular build in question.
cd $SRC/zircon
# for aarch64
make -j32 arm64
# for x64
make -j32 x64
To build Zircon using Clang as the target toolchain, set the
USE_CLANG=true
variable when invoking Make.
cd $SRC/zircon
# for aarch64
make -j32 USE_CLANG=true arm64
# for x64
make -j32 USE_CLANG=true x64
# The -r enables release builds as well
./scripts/buildall -r
Please build for all targets before submitting to ensure builds work on all architectures.
You can skip this if you're only testing on actual hardware, but the emulator is handy for quick local tests and generally worth having around.
See QEMU for information on building and using QEMU with zircon.
If the prebuilt toolchain binaries do not work for you, you can build your own from vanilla upstream sources.
- The GCC toolchain is used to build Zircon by default.
- The Clang toolchain is used to build Zircon if you build with
USE_CLANG=true
orUSE_ASAN=true
. - The Clang toolchain is also used by default to build host-side code, but any C++14-capable toolchain for your build host should work fine.
Build one or the other or both, as needed for how you want build Zircon.
We use GNU binutils
2.30(*
) and GCC 8.2(**
), configured with
--enable-initfini-array --enable-gold
, and with --target=x86_64-elf --enable-targets=x86_64-pep
for x86-64 or --target=aarch64-elf
for ARM64.
For binutils
, we recommend --enable-deterministic-archives
but that switch
is not necessary to get a working build.
For GCC, it's necessary to pass MAKEOVERRIDES=USE_GCC_STDINT=provide
on the
make
command line. This should ensure that the stdint.h
GCC installs is
one that works standalone (stdint-gcc.h
in the source) rather than one that
uses #include_next
and expects another stdint.h
file installed elsewhere.
Only the C and C++ language support is required and no target libraries other
than libgcc
are required, so you can use various configure
switches to
disable other things and make your build of GCC itself go more quickly and use
less storage, e.g. --enable-languages=c,c++ --disable-libstdcxx --disable-libssp --disable-libquadmath
. See the GCC installation
documentation for more details.
You may need various other configure
switches or other prerequisites to
build on your particular host system. See the GNU documentation.
(*
) The binutils
2.30 release has some harmless make check
failures in
the aarch64-elf
and x86_64-elf
configurations. These are fixed on the
upstream binutils-2_30-branch
git branch, which is what we actually build.
But the 2.30 release version works fine for building Zircon; it just has some
spurious failures in its own test suite.
(**
) As of 2008-6-15, GCC 8.2 has not been released yet. There is no
released version of GCC that works for building Zircon without backporting
some fixes. What we actually use is the upstream gcc-8-branch
git branch.
We use a trunk snapshot of Clang and update to new snapshots frequently. Any
build of recent-enough Clang with support for x86_64
and aarch64
compiled
in should work. You'll need a toolchain that also includes the runtime
libraries. We normally also use the same build of Clang for the host as well
as for the *-fuchsia
targets. See
here
for details on how we build Clang.
If you're using the prebuilt toolchains, you can skip this step, since the build will find them automatically.
Create a GNU makefile fragment in local.mk
that points to where you
installed the toolchains:
CLANG_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX := .../clang-install/bin/
ARCH_x86_64_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX := .../gnu-install/bin/x86_64-elf-
ARCH_arm64_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX := .../gnu-install/bin/aarch64-elf-
Note that CLANG_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX
should have a trailing slash, and the
ARCH_*_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX
variables for the GNU toolchains should include the
${target_alias}-
prefix, so that simple command names like gcc
, ld
, or
clang
can be appended to the prefix with no separator. If the clang
or
gcc
in your PATH
works for Zircon, you can just use empty prefixes.
With local link IPv6 configured, the host tool ./build-ARCH/tools/netcp can be used to copy files.
# Copy the file myprogram to Zircon
netcp myprogram :/tmp/myprogram
# Copy the file myprogram back to the host
netcp :/tmp/myprogram myprogram
The Zircon build creates a bootfs image containing necessary userspace components for the system to boot (the device manager, some device drivers, etc). The kernel is capable of including a second bootfs image which is provided by QEMU or the bootloader as a ramdisk image.
To create such a bootfs image, use the zbi tool that's generated as part of the build. It can assemble a bootfs image for either source directories (in which case every file in the specified directory and its subdirectories are included) or via a manifest file which specifies on a file-by-file basis which files to include.
$BUILDDIR/tools/zbi -o extra.bootfs @/path/to/directory
echo "issue.txt=/etc/issue" > manifest
echo "etc/hosts=/etc/hosts" >> manifest
$BUILDDIR/tools/zbi -o extra.bootfs manifest
On the booted Zircon system, the files in the bootfs will appear under /boot, so in the above manifest example, the "hosts" file would appear at /boot/etc/hosts.
For QEMU, use the -x option to the run-zircon-* scripts to specify an extra bootfs image.
Network booting is supported via two mechanisms: Gigaboot and Zirconboot. Gigaboot is an EFI based bootloader whereas zirconboot is a mechanism that allows a minimal zircon system to serve as a bootloader for zircon.
On systems that boot via EFI (such as Acer and NUC), either option is viable. On other systems, zirconboot may be the only option for network booting.
The GigaBoot20x6 bootloader speaks a simple network boot protocol (over IPV6 UDP) which does not require any special host configuration or privileged access to use.
It does this by taking advantage of IPV6 Link Local Addressing and Multicast, allowing the device being booted to advertise its bootability and the host to find it and send a system image to it.
If you have a device (for example a Broadwell or Skylake Intel NUC) running GigaBoot20x6 first create a USB drive manually or (Linux only) using the script.
$BUILDDIR/tools/bootserver $BUILDDIR/zircon.bin
# if you have an extra bootfs image (see above):
$BUILDDIR/tools/bootserver $BUILDDIR/zircon.bin /path/to/extra.bootfs
By default bootserver will continue to run and every time it obsveres a netboot beacon it will send the kernel (and bootfs if provided) to that device. If you pass the -1 option, bootserver will exit after a successful boot instead.
Zirconboot is a mechanism that allows a zircon system to serve as the bootloader for zircon itself. Zirconboot speaks the same boot protocol as Gigaboot described above.
To use zirconboot, pass the netsvc.netboot=true
argument to zircon via the
kernel command line. When zirconboot starts, it will attempt to fetch and boot
into a zircon system from a bootserver running on the attached host.
The default build of Zircon includes a network log service that multicasts the system log over the link local IPv6 UDP. Please note that this is a quick hack and the protocol will certainly change at some point.
For now, if you're running Zircon on QEMU with the -N flag or running on hardware with a supported ethernet interface (ASIX USB Dongle or Intel Ethernet on NUC), the loglistener tool will observe logs broadcast over the local link:
$BUILDDIR/tools/loglistener
For random tips on debugging in the zircon environment see debugging.
- See contributing.md.