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Compiling Xenclient on Debian Lenny

Xenclient is one of those projects where you do a fairly small check out, perform some configuration, press the go button, and it builds a small universe worth of software, downloading things as needed. In my experience build-breakage usually ensues in such situations.

Here is the winning combination I came up with to compile the system on Lenny. Installing and testing I will leave for another day.

• The build needs to be done on an x86 32bit system. It should be possible to do this non-natively using a cross-compiler or a chroot. I didn't feel like enhancing the difficulty of the task at hand, so I just found a system on which I could run a native compile.

  A mailing list post breifly discussing this topic can be found here

• Ensure that the following packages are installed: build-essential, bison, flex, guilt, texinfo, git, bcc, gettext, rsync, iasl, locales, python, gawk and subversion.

• Ensure that the en_US.UTF-8 locale is present on the system. This can be done this before the locales package is installed by running the following. Note that debconf-set-selections needs to run as root, which can be achieved by prefixing its invocation with sudo, assuming sudo is set up.

  # echo "locales locales/locales_to_be_generated string en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" | \
  	debconf-set-selections
  

  Or this can be done by after the locales package is installed by running the following as root:

  # dpkg-reconfigure locales
  

• Check-out the initial source code.

  # git clone http://xenbits.xen.org/git-http/xenclient/build.git
  # cd build
  

• Unset some environment variables.

  # unset MAKE
  # unset CFLAGS
  

  The build system bailed-out early on and asked me to unset CFLAGS. I bailed-out of my MAKE="make -j3" build when the load went over 3000!

• Copy the sample configuration, disable partd and select the 2.6.18 kernel. My preference was for the 2.6.27.5 kernel, but this failed to build.

  # cp configs/xenclient_config ./.config
  # echo "# BR2_PACKAGE_PARTED is not set" >> .config
  # echo "BR2_XENCLIENT_KERNEL_2_6_18=y" >> .config
  # echo "# BR2_XENCLIENT_KERNEL_2_6_27 is not set" >> .config
  

• Activate the configuration.

  # make oldconfig
  

• Build.

  # make
  

  This may take quite a while. It will download things, though it is nice enough to cache most of the downloads in dl/. In the end it consumed about 5Gb of disk space on my system. I did have good luck restarting the build. Hopefully with this advice there won't be a need to restart.

• Ponder the installation instructions in the HOWTO found in the top-level directory.

Fri, 22 May 2009 13:46:03 +1000| Permalink