bootstrap-seeds

I believe Guix also borrowed[1,2] the bootstrap chain[3,4,5] written by Jeremiah Orians, same as you did. [1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-... [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/ [3] https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Stage0 [4] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/ [5] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds

That’s normally what this means, yes, with a few more intermediate steps. There’s only one bootstrap chain like this that I know of[1,2,3], maintained by Jeremiah Orians and the Guix project; judging from the reference to 180 bytes, that’s what the distro GP describes is using as well. > This is a set of manually created hex programs in a Cthulhu Path to madness fashion. Which only have the goal of creating a bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC, with only the explicit requirement of a single 1 KByte binary or less. [1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-... [2] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/ [3] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds

legibility is a lost cause in the case of the binary seed anyway, so you might as well shoot for more simplicity. https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/4715ae5292a6... is down to 512 bytes, and it's clearly possible to go further than that

Check out the 357-byte x86_64 ELF file to bootstrap the entire Guix software stack (albeit with a guile helper library) https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-... The annotated ELF file contains two types of comment annotations corresponding to the different software that parses it. https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...

This[0] is basically the hand-documentation of those bytes then. Handwritten ELF header and assembly code. [0] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...

The bootstrap seed, https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX..., is a tiny interpreter that takes a much larger program written in a special-purpose, bytecode-based language. This proceeds in turn once or twice more--special purpose program generating another interpreter for another special-purpose language--until you end up with a minimal Scheme interpreter, which then can be used to execute a C compiler program. All of this is incredible work, but a minimal C-subset compiler in under 512 bytes of x86 assembly seems like a unique achievement as it includes non-trivial parsing and linking phases not required for that hex0 interpreter.

Yeah, it's a binary blob, but it's small enough to be easily auditable. Anyone with some knowledge of x86 assembly can read the annotated version [1] and verify that it does what it claims (which is to convert ASCII hex with comments into binary). You're right, it also requires a Linux kernel, and of course, you also have to trust the hardware you're running it on. Still, it reduces the amount of stuff we have to take for granted as trusted, which I think is a good thing. (I'm not involved in the project, just an admirer). [1]: https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/b09a8b8cbcb6...

See this doc for how the full process works: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... In particular, this the very first step: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0-posix/blob/master/x86/hex0... (or its hand-edited binary version ?) Edit: this how it's "assembled": sed 's/[;#].*$//g' $input_file | xxd -r -p > $output_file See: https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/READM...