[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why
Date:
Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:12:27 +0000
Description:
This year's edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Yearly conference , better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the
beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC)
in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions:
Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal
and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains
and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation
about bootstrappable builds ,
which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds , though LWN
did look at the topic just over two years
ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny
program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is
built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a
completely understood originunlike a typical Linux user space today.
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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/
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