[U-Boot] [Reproducible-builds] [PATCH] build: create time and date independent binary

Holger Levsen holger at layer-acht.org
Sun Jul 19 14:36:07 CEST 2015


Hi Paul,

sorry for the late reply. 

On Samstag, 13. Juni 2015, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> > you've seen https://reproducible.debian.net/u-boot ?
> This seems very minimalistic, but it's good to see U-Boot was given some
> attention already!

:-)
 
> > but maybe you can explain why u-boot needs more reproducibility testing
> > than what there currently is. i'm definitly interested and not opposed,
> > even though I think there shoukd be good reasons to treat some software
> > specially.
> The point is to make U-Boot reproducible for all possible targets, not
> only the few ones that are supported by U-Boot. 

I think your sentence is missing some word…?!?

> I think this requires
> some extra infrastructure. In that sense, it is very similar to
> Coreboot.
> 
> > (also please note that we currently only have amd64 hw to run our tests
> > on.)
> 
> The problem is the same as Coreboot, which uses its own toolchain to
> build images. We don't need to have native armhf builds for U-Boot,
> testing with the armhf toolchain that is in Debian should be enough.

I see.
 
> I understand, this works out nicely because all the work on Coreboot
> will be inherited by Libreboot. However, on U-Boot, the work to bring
> reproducible builds has to take place initially. I know for a fact that
> parts of the code use things like __FILE__ or timestamps.

Ah.
 
> That makes sense. For U-Boot, it will certainly make sense for the
> distributions packaging it. I'm the main developer of Replicant, the
> fully free version of Android, and it would definitely be useful to have
> a smartphone on which we can trust that the bootloader can be built in a
> reproducible manner (and checked after being installed).

indeed!
 
> > All this said, if you send me patches, I will probably deploy them as I'm
> > very curious and more reproducibility efforts are good :-) We can can
> > always decide to remove or move them later.
> 
> I wish to make all contributions upstream. What would really help at
> first would be to have all targets built regularly to see where work is
> needed. This is where I think the Debian infrastructure could help, in a
> similar way as what was started for Coreboot.

can you point me to a how to explaining this or tell me those steps, starting 
with "git clone..."?


cheers,
	Holger


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