Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
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Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#2Nice work Fossy and co.
I believe this is this is the dependency chain your live-bootstrap works through: https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/raw/master/live-bootst...
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#3See also Bellard's TCCBOOT, which is based on the far simpler TCC instead of GCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#4This is cool as heck. Outside of architectural attacks, this seems like a practical response to Reflections on Trusting Trust (http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thom...).
While we can definitely discuss whether it's practical for anyone to actually audit all that source code (no it is not), proving a 356 bytes codestream isn't malicious seems like a good foundation to argue about.
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#5See also blynn-compiler[0], made by the same contributors, that bootstrap a Haskell compiler from C (which in term is bootstrapped from hex).
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#6See also Bellard's TCCBOOT, which is based on the far simpler TCC instead of GCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
One nice thing about the work showcased here is that it bootstraps TCC on its journey to GCC. At some point we could see attempts to bootstrap tccboot as a kind of "escape pod" from other systems, and after booting tccboot, have the bootstrapping work documented here continue from TCC onward.
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#7This is cool as heck. Outside of architectural attacks, this seems like a practical response to Reflections on Trusting Trust ( http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thom... ). While we can definitely discuss whether it's practical for anyone to actually audit all that source code (no it is not), proving a 356 bytes codestream isn't malicious seems like a good foundation to argue about.
suspicious squints
Perhaps this bit is key as you could cross reference the two:
> Furthermore, having an alternative bootstrap automation tool allows people to have greater trust in the bootstrap procedure.
Interesting thought exercise.
Edit: Avoid this subject unless you want to be nerd sniped and spiral into paranoia.
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#8So, how about the kernel, eh? ;)
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#9See also Bellard's TCCBOOT, which is based on the far simpler TCC instead of GCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
That's a different kind of bootstrapping though. The OP is about building up to a toolchain from almost nothing using only source code and only relying on some tiny binaries that could be hand-assembled or verified. And it also uses a version of TinyCC along the way before it arrives to gcc.
Re: Bootstrapping from Hex to Bison to GCC
#10See this doc for how the full process works:
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
In particular, this the very first step: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0-posix/blob/master/x86/hex0... (or its hand-edited binary version ?)
Edit: this how it's "assembled":
sed 's/[;#].*$//g' $input_file | xxd -r -p > $output_file