#+TITLE: Compiling Rakudo Star on OpenBSD 6.7 #+DATE: 2020-07-25T02:54:34-04:00 #+DRAFT: false #+DESCRIPTION: My process for compiling Rakudo Star on OpenBSD #+TAGS[]: openbsd raku #+KEYWORDS[]: openbsd raku #+SLUG: #+SUMMARY: #+ATTR_HTML: :alt Rakudo on OpenBSD #+ATTR_HTML: :title Rakudo on OpenBSD [[file:cover.png]] *EDIT*: After writing this post, [[https://tyil.nl/][tyil]], the maintainer of rakudo star, reached out to me and added proper OpenBSD compatibility. The portion of this post dedicated to working around the failing downloads can now be ignored, and rstar now includes a warning if the user doesn't have a login class set. *EDIT*: The development version of Rakudo Star targets Rakudo 2020.07 instead of 2020.02, which has uses even more memory than the staff login class is allowed. You may need to edit =/etc/login.conf= and change this line. #+BEGIN_SRC diff --- login.conf Wed Jul 29 17:54:15 2020 +++ login.conf.new Wed Jul 29 17:54:38 2020 @@ -71,7 +71,7 @@ # Staff have fewer restrictions and can login even when nologins are set. # staff:\ - :datasize-cur=1536M:\ + :datasize-cur=2536M:\ :datasize-max=infinity:\ :maxproc-max=512:\ :maxproc-cur=256:\ #+END_SRC Or you can set a higher memory limit if you're using the =staff= class using =ulimit -m=. @@html:
@@ I really enjoy using [[https://raku.org/][raku]] to write small scripts for system maintenance and text parsing. Its regex and grammar engine are next level! The problem with using it on OpenBSD is that the packaged version is a couple years out of date. The version in ports is from 2018, which contains a bug regarding NativeCall on OpenBSD. Not to mention it's missing a lot of performance gains and patches. Instead of just compiling everything from source and installing them myself as I did on my last system, I installed it using the [[https://github.com/rakudo/star][rakudo star]] distribution and its =rstar= command. Rakudo Star is raku plus some community modules and the =zef= package manager. It also comes with the =rstar= command, which helps you in the build process. Unfortunately, the first thing I had to do was install =bash=, as that is what the =rstar= command is written in. #+BEGIN_SRC shell doas pkg_add bash #+END_SRC After installing =bash=, I came across a problem. Running =./bin/rstar fetch= fetches all of the materials required to compile and assemble the star distribution, and while all of the community modules were successfully retrieved using =git=, it failed to pull in all 3 major source components. =MoarVM=, =nqp=, and =rakudo=, are pulled in as gzipped tarballs, each of them failing to download. I suspect it's an issue with something in the bash scripts. Tar also throws a warning about one of its arguments, which has to do with the script using a GNU tar specific command. #+BEGIN_SRC [2020-07-25T05:25:33] [NOTIC] Downloading https://www.moarvm.org/releases/MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.IMPt8mIFoC tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched: --strip-components=1 [2020-07-25T05:25:34] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/moarvm-2020.02.1 [2020-07-25T05:25:34] [NOTIC] Downloading https://github.com/perl6/nqp/releases/download/2020.02.1/nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.zDxiGW2Sxq tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched: --strip-components=1 [2020-07-25T05:25:40] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/nqp-2020.02.1 [2020-07-25T05:25:40] [NOTIC] Downloading https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/releases/download/2020.02.1/rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.W1mRYHVj1C tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched: --strip-components=1 [2020-07-25T05:25:46] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/rakudo-2020.02.1 #+END_SRC To work around this I downloaded the required files manually using OpenBSD's =ftp= command and extracted them into the =src= directory that had been created by the script. A small caveat is that MoarVM automatically extracts into a directory called =MoarVM-2020.02.1=, which needs to be completely lower-cased for the =rstar= to work. #+BEGIN_SRC shell cd src ftp https://www.moarvm.org/releases/MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz ftp https://github.com/perl6/nqp/releases/download/2020.02.1/nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz ftp https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/releases/download/2020.02.1/rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz tar -xzf MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz tar -xzf nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz tar -xzf rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz mv MoarVM-2020.02.1 moarvm-2020.02.1 rm *.tar.gz cd .. #+END_SRC Running =rstar install= then began compiling things. =rstar install= will install rakudo star into the build directory by default, but you can change that with =-p= to specify a prefix location. MoarVM and nqp both compiled and installed fine, but when it came to compiling Rakudo, it failed with a memory allocation error message. #+BEGIN_SRC +++ Generating gen/moar/Compiler.nqp +++ Generating gen/moar/Optimizer.nqp +++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Optimizer.moarvm +++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Compiler.moarvm +++ Compiling rakudo.moarvm +++ Generating gen/moar/BOOTSTRAP/v6c.nqp +++ Generating gen/moar/Metamodel.nqp +++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Metamodel.moarvm +++ Compiling blib/Perl6/BOOTSTRAP/v6c.moarvm +++ Compiling blib/CORE.c.setting.moarvm The following step can take a long time, please be patient. Stage start : 0.000 MoarVM panic: Memory allocation failed; could not allocate 84800 bytes *** Error 1 in /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.gqTyPvsgV1 (Makefile:800 'blib/CORE.c.setting.moarvm': @'/home/dante/star/bin/moar' --libpath='/home...) [2020-07-25T05:38:43] [ALERT] Build failed! #+END_SRC I tried then manually building rakudo to see if I could figure out what the problem was. #+BEGIN_SRC shell cd src/rakudo-2020.02.1 ./Configure.pl --prefix /home/dante/star/ make #+END_SRC While rakudo was compiling, I monitored memory usage in a separate =tmux= pane, and noticed that the =moarvm= process was using around 760 MB of RAM before it crashed. 768 MB is the maximum amount of ram a process can use in OpenBSD when run by a user with the default login class, as specified in =/etc/login.conf=. To remedy the problem, I changed my user's class to =staff=, which grants it a much higher =datasize= limit, among a couple other things. If you're interested about how this works, you can check out [[https://man.openbsd.org/login.conf.5][=login.conf(5)=]] and the =/etc/login.conf= file on your system. #+BEGIN_SRC shell doas usermod -L staff dante #+END_SRC After setting my login class, and logging out and back in, I restarted the build and install using the =rstar install= command as before, just to make sure it sets everything up how it wants. After about half an hour of compilation, I was finally presented the following message. #+BEGIN_SRC [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] Rakudo Star has been installed into /home/dante/star! [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] The installation took 0h 25m 02s. [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] You may need to add the following paths to your $PATH: [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/bin [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/site/bin [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/vendor/bin [2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/core/bin #+END_SRC Alright! I added the specified directories to my path by editing =~/.profile= and inserting the following line. #+BEGIN_SRC diff --- .profile Sat Jul 25 06:42:48 2020 +++ .profile Sat Jul 25 06:42:31 2020 @@ -3,4 +3,5 @@ # sh/ksh initialization PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games +PATH=$PATH:/home/dante/star/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/site/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/vendor/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/core/bin export PATH HOME TERM #+END_SRC I chose to keep it in the =/home/dante/star= directory instead of installing it to =/usr/local= in case the version of rakudo in ports gets updated some time. I now have an up to date version of raku running on my OpenBSD machine!