Building Magenta on Archlinux posted on 08 July 2017

I have been a bit curious about Fuchsia/Magenta. From the README:

Magenta is the core platform that powers the Fuchsia OS. Magenta is composed of a microkernel (source in kernel/…) as well as a small set of userspace services, drivers, and libraries (source in system/…) necessary for the system to boot, talk to hardware, load userspace processes and run them, etc. Fuchsia builds a much larger OS on top of this foundation.

I decided to poke a bit around. Here are a quick notes on how to build it on Arch. These instructions assume you have the usual tools like base-devel.

The canonical git repository is at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta. There is also a mirror (read only) on GitHub https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta.

Download the tool chain:

./scripts/download-toolchain

Install libtinfo from AUR:

yaourt -S libtinfo

Archlinux comes with /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.6 (not /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5) and I didn’t feel like installing another version of libtinfo, so i just created a symlink to the new version. So far, everything seems to work fine.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.6.0 /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5

Build it:

make -j4 magenta-pc-x86-64

Install QEMU except if you plan to just test it on real hardware:

sudo pacman -S qemu

Run it:

./scripts/run-magenta-x86-64