Bootstrapping software distributions

Abstract

New hardware architectures and custom coprocessor extensions are introduced to the market on a regular basis. While it is relatively easy to port a proprietary software stack to a new platform, FOSS distributions face major challenges. Bootstrapping distributions proved to be a yearlong manual process in the past due to a large amount of dependency cycles which had to be broken by hand. In this paper we propose an heuristic-based algorithm to remove build dependency cycles and to create a build order for automatically bootstrapping a binary based software distribution on a new platform.