Building

Building the kernel is a fairly straightforward process.

Dependencies

Building Gaia requires the following programs to be installed:

• meson

• ninja

• clang

• lld

As for fetching the source code, git is required.

Fetching the source code

The latest version of the source code as can be fetched from GitHub using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/nyx-org/gaia --recursive

Preparing the build system

meson is used as the build system because of its user-friendliness and easy cross-compilation, but it must be set up properly in order for the kernel to be built properly.

As mentioned previously, meson makes cross-compilation quite easy, it is therefore quite easy to retarget the kernel and use different toolchains. Toolchains can be found in the toolchains directory in the root of the repository.

Here are the currently available toolchains:

• x86_64-llvm: build the kernel using the LLVM toolchain to run on x86_64 devices

• riscv64-llvm: build the kernel using the LLVM toolchain to run on riscv64 devices

• aarch64-llvm: build the kernel using the LLVM toolchain to run on aarch64 devices

GNU toolchains are not yet available since clang allows for cross-compilation in a single binary and therefore was originally simpler to set up.

The build system can be configured to use your toolchain with the following command:

meson setup build --cross-file toolchains/<toolchain>.ini

Building the kernel

meson is not, in fact, a proper build system in itself; it rather generates ninja build files, the kernel can therefore be built by running ninja as such:

ninja -j$(nproc) -C build