Bundling Inferno Applications

2016-08-12

Bundling Inferno Applications

Inferno can run as a standalone OS or hosted in an existing OS. In the latter case an emu executable runs and executes as a virtual operating system. An application written in Limbo runs inside this virtual OS. When distributing such an application you can install Inferno on the target machine with the application compiled code inside the filesystem of Inferno. This will include a bunch of stuff that the application may not need since it includes all the utilities for the operating system. To distribute the minimal amount of dependencies to run the Limbo application you can create a cut down Inferno distribution that only includes the application dependencies and run that. Another option is to bundle the root filesystem into the executable leaving only that executable to be distributed.

Application specific Inferno

To create an application specific Inferno install we need to find out what the dependencies are for the application. Most of the following comes from powerman's post on the topic in Russian.

When running emu it runs a program /dis/emuinit.dis to initialize the system and start the shell or other program. An application specific Inferno distribution would require:

emu
/dis/emuinit.dis
/dis/lib/emuinit.dis
Your application program files inside the Inferno directory structure somewhere.

Powerman's post goes into detail on how to do this with the following "Hello World" Limbo application:

implement HelloWorld;
include "sys.m";
include "draw.m";

HelloWorld: module
{
    init: fn(nil: ref Draw->Context, nil: list of string);
};

init(nil: ref Draw->Context, nil: list of string)
{
    sys := load Sys Sys->PATH;
    sys->print("Hello World!\n");
}

With this in a helloworld.b file, compiling it produces helloworld.dis. This contains the compiled bytecode for the Dis virtual machine. disdep will list the dependencies that it requires:

; limbo helloworld.b
; ./helloworld
Hello World!
; disdep helloworld.dis
; disdep /dis/emuinit.dis
/dis/lib/arg.dis
/dis/sh.dis
/dis/lib/bufio.dis
/dis/lib/env.dis
/dis/lib/readdir.dis
/dis/lib/filepat.dis
/dis/lib/string.dis

This shows the helloworld has no dependencies outside of what's already built into emu and emuinit.dis contains a few. Creating a directory layout with just these files and emu should be enough to run helloworld. In the following example foo is the directory containing the full Inferno distribution where helloworld.b was compiled.

$ mkdir -p hw/dis/lib
$ cd hw
$ cp ../foo/Linux/386/bin/emu .
$ cp ../foo/dis/emuinit.dis dis/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/arg.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/bufio.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/env.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/readdir.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/filepat.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/lib/string.dis dis/lib/
$ cp ../foo/dis/sh.dis dis/
$ cp ../foo/usr/inferno/helloworld.dis .
$ ./emu -r. helloworld
Hello World!

Some of these dependencies aren't needed, for example sh.dis as we don't run the shell. See Powerman's post for a more extensive example that has dependencies.

Bundling application into emu

Instead of distributing a directory of files as in the previous example it's possible to bundle a root filesystem inside the emu program. This allows distributing just a single executable that runs the Limbo application. The steps to do this involve finding the dependencies of the program as above and creating a kernel configuration file that lists them.

The file /emu/Linux/emu is the kernel configuration file for the Linux Inferno VM. It has a root section which defines the root filesystem:

root
        /dev    /
        /fd     /
        /prog   /
        /prof   /
        /net    /
        /net.alt        /
        /chan   /
        /nvfs   /
        /env    /
#       /dis
#       /n
#       /icons
#       /osinit.dis
#       /dis/emuinit.dis
#       /dis/lib/auth.dis
#       /dis/lib/ssl.dis
#       /n/local /

The actual filesystem as located by the -r command line argument to emu is overlayed on top of this. Copying this file and adding our dependencies will bundle them into a custom build executable. This is what the root section of our helloworld looks like:

root
        /dev    /
        /fd     /
        /prog   /
        /prof   /
        /net    /
        /net.alt        /
        /chan   /
        /nvfs   /
        /env    /
        /dis
        /dis/emuinit.dis /usr/chris/helloworld.dis

Here we make helloworld.dis appear in the root filesystem as /dis/emuinit.dis, which is the first program run as the system comes up. Note that this file must use tabs, not spaces, for the entries. An executable can be compiled with this bundled root filesystem with:

$ cd emu/Linux
$ ...create helloworld configuration file...
$ mk CONF=helloworld

This produces an executable o.helloworld which when run will execute the helloworld.dis embedded inside it:

$ ./o.helloworld
Hello World!

When stripped the executable is about 1.5MB. This executable links to the X11 libraries. For a headless system you can remove the dependancy by using the emu-g kernel configuration file as a base. This removes the drivers that use X11 and prevents linking against the X11 libraries. The resulting executable when stripped is now 700K.

The executable produced by this process has some dynamic dependencies - libc, etc - that most glibc applications have. It should be possible to use musl-libc to produce a static binary and I'll cover this in another post.

Bluish Coder