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xPack Build Box v3.4 released

· 3 min read
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)

Version 3.4 is a new release; it adds Support for Apple Silicon.

The xPack Build Box (XBB) is a build environment intended for reproducible builds.

Supported platforms​

XBB supports building binaries for the following platforms:

  • x64 GNU/Linux
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux
  • x64 macOS
  • x64 Windows

Windows binaries are built on GNU/Linux, using mingw-w64.

Compatibility​

To allow the resulting binaries to run on as many existing systems as possible, the XBB build environments are on purpose based on older GNU/Linux and macOS releases:

  • x64/arm64/arm GNU/Linux: Ubuntu 12.04 with GLIBC 2.27; this should provide compatibility with:
    • Ubuntu 18 or later
    • Debian 10 or later
    • RedHat 8 or later
    • Fedora 29 or later
    • any other distributions using GLIBC 2.15 or higher
  • x86/x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the new Universal C Runtime (UCRT)
  • x64 macOS: 10.13; this should provide compatibility with macOS 10.13 or later
  • arm64 macOS 11.6; this should provide compatibility with macOS 11.6 or later

GLIBC version​

To find out the GLIBC version on a given GNU/Linux distribution, use:

ldd --version

Tools versions​

In version 3.3, the main tools provided by XBB were updated to:

  • GCC 11.2.0
  • binutils 2.36.1
  • mingw-w64 9.0.0
  • m4 1.4.19
  • gawk 5.1.1
  • sed 4.8
  • autoconf 2.71
  • automake 1.16.5
  • make 4.3
  • perl 5.34.0
  • cmake 3.21.4
  • python 3.9.9
  • ninja 1.10.2
  • wine 6.17

For the full list of available tools, see the common-versions-xbb-source.sh file.

GNU/Linux Docker images​

On GNU/Linux, the production XBB consists of multiple Docker images, in pairs of 32/64-bit, for each platform and version.

The images are published on Docker Hub (pulling can be done anonymously, pushing requires login).

Intel GNU/Linux:

  • ilegeul/ubuntu:amd64-18.04-xbb-v3.4
$ docker images
REPOSITORY       TAG                              IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
ilegeul/ubuntu   amd64-18.04-xbb-v3.4             ace5ae2e98e5   4 weeks ago    5.11GB

The images were created on a Debian 10 running on an Intel NUC.

Arm GNU/Linux:

  • ilegeul/ubuntu:arm64v8-18.04-xbb-v3.4
  • ilegeul/ubuntu:arm32v7-18.04-xbb-v3.4
REPOSITORY            TAG                                IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
ilegeul/ubuntu        arm64v8-18.04-xbb-v3.4             4e7f14f6c886   3 weeks ago     3.29GB
ilegeul/ubuntu        arm32v7-18.04-xbb-v3.4             a3718a8e6d0f   3 weeks ago     2.92GB

The arm64v8 image was created on a 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS running on a Raspberry CM4 with 8 GB RAM. The arm32v7 image was built on a 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS with 4 GB RAM.

macOS​

When running on macOS, the build scripts cannot use Docker, since there are no macOS Docker images; instead, a custom set of tools is expected in a specific folder (like ${HOME}/.local/xbb), which includes the same tools as packed in the Docker images.

Command Line Tools​

As usual with macOS, the compiler and other development tools are not packed in the base system and need to be installed separately as part of the Command Line Tools package, available from Apple.

The XBB binaries expect the CLT binary tools to be present in a fixed location, which is:

  • /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin

TeX​

All platforms include an instance of the 2018 TeX Live tools.