Creating Toolchain Archives¶

There are various scripts in the repository for producing archives of the build tools (e.g. compilers and linkers) required to build.

Clang and Rust¶

To modify the toolchains used for a particular task, you may need several things:

A build task
Which uses a toolchain task
- clang toolchain
- rust toolchain
Which uses a git fetch
- clang fetch
- (from-source dev builds only) rust fetch
(clang only) Which uses a config json
Which takes patches you may want to apply.

For the most part, you should be able to accomplish what you want by copying/editing the existing examples in those files.

Clang¶

Building clang is handled by build-clang.py, which uses several resources in the build-clang directory. Read the build-clang README for more details.

Note for local builds: build-clang.py can be run on developer machines but its lengthy multi-stage build process is unnecessary for most local development. The upstream LLVM Getting Started Guide has instructions on how to build clang more directly.

Rust¶

Rust builds are handled by repack_rust.py. The primary purpose of that script is to download prebuilt tarballs from the Rust project.

It uses the same basic format as rustup for specifying the toolchain (via --channel):

request a stable build with 1.xx.y (e.g. 1.47.0)
request a beta build with beta-yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. beta-2020-08-26)
request a nightly build with nightly-yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. nightly-2020-08-26)
request a build from Rust’s ci with bors-$sha (e.g. bors-796a2a9bbe7614610bd67d4cd0cf0dfff0468778)
request a from-source build with dev

Rust From Source¶

As of this writing, from-source builds for Rust are a new feature, and not used anywhere by default. The feature was added so that we can test patches to rustc against the tree. Expect things to be a bit hacky and limited.

Most importantly, building from source requires your toolchain to have a fetch of the rust tree as well as clang and binutils toolchains. It is also recommended to upgrade the worker-type to e.g. b-linux-large.

Rust’s build dependencies are fairly minimal, and it has a sanity check that should catch any missing or too-old dependencies. See the Rust README for more details.

Patches are set via the –patch flag (passed via toolchain/rust.yml). Patch paths are assumed to be relative to /build/build-rust/, and may be optionally prefixed with module-path: to specify they apply to that git submodule in the Rust source. e.g. --patch src/llvm-project:mypatch.diff patches rust’s llvm with /build/build-rust/mypatch.diff. There are no currently checked in rust patches to use as an example, but they should be the same format as the clang ones.

Rust builds are not currently configurable, and uses a hardcoded config.toml, which you may need to edit for your purposes. See Rust’s example config for details/defaults. Note that these options do occasionally change, so be sure you’re using options for the version you’re targeting. For instance, there was a large change around Rust ~1.48, and the currently checked in config was for 1.47, so it may not work properly when building the latest version of Rust.

Rust builds are currently limited to targeting only the host platform. Although the machinery is in place to request additional targets, the cross-compilation fails for some unknown reason. We have not yet investigated what needs to be done to get this working.

While Rust generally maintains a clean tree for building rustc and cargo, other tools like rustfmt or miri are allowed to be transiently broken. This means not every commit in the Rust tree will be able to build the tools we require.

Although repack_rust considers rustfmt an optional package, Rust builds do not currently implement this and will fail if rustfmt is busted. Some attempt was made to work around it, but more work is needed.

Python¶

Python is built from source by taskcluster/scripts/misc/build-cpython.sh on Linux and OSX. We use the upstream installer on Windows, through taskcluster/scripts/misc/pack-cpython.sh. In order to ensure consistency, we use the same version for both approaches. Note however that the Windows installer is not packaged for all patch versions, so there might be a slight delta there.

Windows¶

The build/vs/generate_yaml.py and taskcluster/scripts/misc/get_vs.py scripts are used to manage and get Windows toolchains containing Visual Studio executables, SDKs, etc.

The build/vs/generate_yaml.py script is used to generate one of the YAML files used in the relevant toolchain task. The exact command line used to generate the file is stored in the header of the YAML file itself. Each YAML file records the necessary downloads from Microsoft servers to install the required Visual Studio components given on the command line.

The taskcluster/scripts/misc/get_vs.py script takes a YAML file as input and fills a directory with the corresponding Visual Studio components.

Both scripts should be run via mach python --virtualenv build. The latter is automatically invoked by the bootstrapping mechanism.

MacOS¶

The build/macosx/catalog.py and taskcluster/scripts/misc/unpack-sdk.py scripts are used to manage and get macOS SDKs.

The build/macosx/catalog.py script is used to explore the Apple software update catalog. Running the script with no argument will show a complete list of “products”. You probably don’t want that, but rather start with a filter:

$ ./mach python build/macosx/catalog.py --filter SDK
061-44071 Beats Updater 1.0
071-29699 Command Line Tools for Xcode 12.5
001-89745 Command Line Tools for Xcode 12.4
071-54303 Command Line Tools for Xcode 12.5
002-41708 Command Line Tools for Xcode 13.2
002-83793 Command Line Tools for Xcode 13.4
012-92431 Command Line Tools for Xcode 14.2
032-64167 Command Line Tools for Xcode 14.3

From there, pick the id of the product you’re interested in, and run the script again with that id:

$ ./mach python build/macosx/catalog.py 032-64167
com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/61/032-64167-A_F8LL7XSTW6/k3kg0uip4kxd3qupgy6y8fzp27mnxdpt6y/CLTools_Executables.pkg
com.apple.pkg.CLTools_SDK_macOS13 https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/61/032-64167-A_F8LL7XSTW6/k3kg0uip4kxd3qupgy6y8fzp27mnxdpt6y/CLTools_macOSNMOS_SDK.pkg
com.apple.pkg.CLTools_SDK_macOS12 https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/61/032-64167-A_F8LL7XSTW6/k3kg0uip4kxd3qupgy6y8fzp27mnxdpt6y/CLTools_macOSLMOS_SDK.pkg
com.apple.pkg.CLTools_macOS_SDK https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/61/032-64167-A_F8LL7XSTW6/k3kg0uip4kxd3qupgy6y8fzp27mnxdpt6y/CLTools_macOS_SDK.pkg
com.apple.pkg.CLTools_SwiftBackDeploy https://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/38/61/032-64167-A_F8LL7XSTW6/k3kg0uip4kxd3qupgy6y8fzp27mnxdpt6y/CLTools_SwiftBackDeploy.pkg

From there, pick the id of the package you’re interested in, and run the script again with a combination of both product and package ids to inspect its content and ensure that’s what you’re looking for.

$ ./mach python build/macosx/catalog.py 032-64167/com.apple.pkg.CLTools_SDK_macOS13
Library
Library/Developer
Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs
Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX13.sdk
Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX13.3.sdk
Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX13.3.sdk/usr
(...)

Once you have found the SDK you want, you can create or update toolchain tasks in taskcluster/kinds/toolchain/macosx-sdk.yml.

The taskcluster/scripts/misc/unpack-sdk.py script takes the url of a SDK package, the sha512 hash for its content, the path to the SDK in the package, and an output directory, and extracts the package in that directory.

Both scripts should be run via mach python. The latter is automatically invoked by the bootstrapping mechanism.

On automation, the script will download the file from tooltool instead of the original url, so the file should also be uploaded to tooltool with internal visibility. See https://github.com/mozilla-releng/tooltool.

Firefox for Android with Gradle¶

To build Firefox for Android with Gradle in automation, archives containing both the Gradle executable and a Maven repository comprising the exact build dependencies are produced and uploaded to an internal Mozilla server. The build automation will download, verify, and extract these archive before building. These archives provide a self-contained Gradle and Maven repository so that machines don’t need to fetch additional Maven dependencies at build time. (Gradle and the downloaded Maven dependencies can be both redistributed publicly.)

Archiving the Gradle executable is straight-forward, but archiving a local Maven repository is not. Therefore a toolchain job exists for producing the required archives, android-gradle-dependencies. The job runs in a container based on a custom Docker image and spawns a Sonatype Nexus proxying Maven repository process in the background. The job builds Firefox for Android using Gradle and the in-tree Gradle configuration rooted at build.gradle. The spawned proxying Maven repository downloads external dependencies and collects them. After the Gradle build completes, the job archives the Gradle version used to build, and the downloaded Maven repository, and exposes them as Task Cluster artifacts.

To update the version of Gradle in the archive produced, update gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties. Be sure to also update the SHA256 checksum to prevent poisoning the build machines!

To update the versions of Gradle dependencies used, update dependencies sections in the in-tree Gradle configuration rooted at build.gradle. Once you are confident your changes build locally, push a fresh build to try. The android-gradle-dependencies toolchain should run automatically, fetching your new dependencies and wiring them into the appropriate try build jobs.

To update the version of Sonatype Nexus, update the sonatype-nexus fetch task definition.

To modify the Sonatype Nexus configuration, typically to proxy a new remote Maven repository, modify taskcluster/scripts/misc/android-gradle-dependencies/nexus.xml.

There is also a toolchain job that fetches the Android SDK and related packages. To update the versions of packaged fetched, modify python/mozboot/mozboot/android-packages.txt and update the various in-tree versions accordingly.