Reviewing live-bootstrap
live-bootstrap is a worthy attempt to provide a reproducible, automatic, complete end-to-end bootstrap from a minimal number of binary seeds to a supported fully functioning operating system. Although it is starts with a minimal binary seed of only 280 bytes it also depends on a lot of other sources. What are those sources exactly and how can we review these to make sure that live-bootstrap can be trusted?
In the past two years, I spend studying stage0 of the live-bootstrap project in order to understand how it works, to find out on what sources it depends, and to create an interactive documentation hopefully helping others to understand it and review the sources.
In this process, I have written programs to interpret the kaem scripts, an emulator for stage0, and a program to analyze the strace output and generate a T-diagram.
In the presentation, I will talk about the steps I have taken, present the results, and also discuss ways to simplify the stage0 sources, such as developing a C-compiler targeted for compiling the Tiny C Compiler using a small stack based languages as intermediate language.
'Slides' for the presentation: https://iwriteiam.nl/WHY2025_talk.html
Links:
- https://iwriteiam.nl/Software.html
- https://iwriteiam.nl/livebootstrap.html
- https://github.com/FransFaase/Emulator/
- https://fransfaase.github.io/Emulator/tdiagram.html
- https://github.com/FransFaase/MES-replacement
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/