The goal of this article is to guide you through compiling and running Barrelfish inside QEMU, and to write and run programs on Barrelfish itself. The instructions below assume you are using a recent version of Ubuntu.

Requirements

Barrelfish requires the following tools to compile correctly:

• GCC 4.8.2
• GNU binutils 2.24 are known to work
• GNU make
• GHC and some additional libraries

  • Some versions of GHC are not supported. See Section on GHC for more information

We are running nightly build tests on the latest Ubuntu LTS release (14.04.1) and are ensuring Barrelfish always builds using the Ubuntu versions of the above-mentioned tools. You can get a full build environment on Ubuntu by running the following command

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential bison flex cmake gcc-multilib qemu-system-x86 qemu-system-arm ghc libghc-src-exts-dev libghc-ghc-paths-dev libghc-parsec3-dev libghc-random-dev libghc-ghc-mtl-dev libghc-src-exts-dev libghc-async-dev gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabi libgmp3-dev cabal-install 
$ cabal install bytestring-trie

Getting Barrelfish

First we need to get the latest version of Barrelfish from the mercurial repository. Use the following command:

git clone git://git.barrelfish.org/git/barrelfish

Configuring

Once you have cloned the repository, cd into it, create a build directory, and enter it:

cd barrelfish
mkdir build
cd build

Prepare for build: The hake build system

We use hake to build barrelfish.

• You need ghc. See the README. Please, read section GHC Versions for more details.

• Packages
  • libghc-ghc-paths-dev
  • libghc-parsec3-dev
  • libghc-ghc-mtl-dev
  • libghc-src-exts-dev
  • libghc-async-dev
  • libghc-src-exts-dev
  • and via Cabal: bytestring-trie
• You may also need to install the libgmp3-dev and the libghc-random-dev package

GHC Versions

• 7.6.3 is the version we use internally (read: the version Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships). We integrated the patch below which was kindly provided by Wang Nan (wangnan0 at huawei.com) into the main tree to enable support for this (see commit 7e4905a).

diff --git a/hake/Main.hs b/hake/Main.hs
index 8a42a3b..bf0c75b 100644
--- a/hake/Main.hs
+++ b/hake/Main.hs
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ import System.Directory
 import System.Exit
 import GHC hiding (Target)
 import GHC.Paths ( libdir )
-import DynFlags ( defaultLogAction,
+import DynFlags ( defaultFatalMessager, defaultFlushOut,
                   xopt_set,
                   ExtensionFlag (Opt_DeriveDataTypeable) )
 import Data.Dynamic
@@ -362,7 +362,7 @@ evalHakeFiles o allfiles hakefiles =
                     ".",
                     (opt_bfsourcedir o) ./. "hake" ]
     in do
-      defaultErrorHandler defaultLogAction $ do
+      defaultErrorHandler defaultFatalMessager defaultFlushOut $ do
          runGhc (Just libdir) $ do
            dflags <- getSessionDynFlags
           let dflags1 = foldl xopt_set dflags [ Opt_DeriveDataTypeable ]
diff --git a/tools/mackerel/Fields.hs b/tools/mackerel/Fields.hs
index 267cd5e..4d2e860 100644
--- a/tools/mackerel/Fields.hs
+++ b/tools/mackerel/Fields.hs
@@ -121,11 +121,11 @@ make_ftype t@(TypeRef _ _) dn = Just (TN.fromRef t dn)
 -- are polymorphic so that they don't need to know how large the total
 -- load unit is (32 bits? 8 bits?) etc.
 --
-extract_mask :: (Bits a) => Rec -> Integer -> a
+extract_mask :: (Num a, Bits a) => Rec -> Integer -> a
 extract_mask f sz =
     foldl setBit 0 (enumFromTo (fromInteger $ offset f)
                                (fromInteger $ (offset f) + (size f) - 1))
-insert_mask :: (Bits a) => Rec -> Integer -> a
+insert_mask :: (Num a, Bits a) => Rec -> Integer -> a
 insert_mask f sz =
     foldl complementBit (extract_mask f sz) (enumFromTo 0 (fromInteger sz - 1))

diff --git a/tools/mackerel/Main.hs b/tools/mackerel/Main.hs
index 3a8e55d..6a3e0a7 100644
--- a/tools/mackerel/Main.hs
+++ b/tools/mackerel/Main.hs
@@ -26,6 +26,7 @@ import qualified BitFieldDriver
 import qualified ShiftDriver
 import Checks
 import Dev
+import Control.Exception

 --
 -- Command line options and parsing code
diff --git a/tools/mackerel/ShiftDriver.hs b/tools/mackerel/ShiftDriver.hs
index 2a2161b..4ea09f2 100644
--- a/tools/mackerel/ShiftDriver.hs
+++ b/tools/mackerel/ShiftDriver.hs
@@ -306,12 +306,12 @@ snputs_like_call s = snprintf_like_call "snprintf" [ C.StringConstant $ percent_
 --
 -- Functions to generate masks to select or deselect a subfield of bits
 --
-select_mask :: (Bits a) => Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> a
+select_mask :: (Num a, Bits a) => Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> a
 select_mask word_size start width =
     foldl setBit 0 (enumFromTo (fromInteger $ start)
                                (fromInteger $ start + width - 1))

-deselect_mask :: (Bits a) => Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> a
+deselect_mask :: (Num a, Bits a) => Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> a
 deselect_mask word_size start width =
     foldl complementBit (select_mask word_size start width)
               (enumFromTo 0 (fromInteger word_size - 1))

Build barrelfish

Then create the required makefile:

../hake/hake.sh -s .. -a x86_64

or, if you wish to build the 32-bit version:

../hake/hake.sh -s .. -a x86_32

Valid arm targets are:

../hake/hake.sh -s .. -a arm

or

../hake/hake.sh -s .. -a arm11mp

or

../hake/hake.sh -s .. -a arm_gem5

Note: If you get the following error:

../hake/Main.hs:369:25:
    Not in scope: data constructor `Opt_DeriveDataTypeable'

Apply the following patch to hake/Main.hs: Main.hs.patch

Note: If you get the following error:

stack overflow: use +RTS -K<size> to increase it

Try to avoid having the build directory in the source tree

Compiling

Now we can build Barrelfish:

make

To speed things up you can specify a number of jobs. This should ideally be slightly more than the number of cores, so on a 4-core machine you could use:

make -j 5

Once that has completed, you can issue the following command to run Barrelfish on QEMU:

make sim

To allocate more cores to QEMU, instead of the default 2, you can edit the symbolic_targets.mk file in the build directory. Do this by editing the QEMU_CMD line for the architecture you've chosen for Barrelfish.

Known Issues

Gold linker

GNU binutils includes an ELF linker named "gold" which is faster than the default BFD linker for large C++ applications. However, when linking Barrelfish's CPU driver you may see the following error:

/usr/bin/ld: fatal error: -pie and -static are incompatible
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [x86_64/sbin/cpu] Error 1

To fix this issue uninstall the binutils-gold package. For further details on why this occurs see this discussion.