Much of this based from the incredible guide by user (and my mentor) Juippis and his work over at The ultimate testing system with lxd. In fact most of what comes next comes directly from Juippis himself.
The reason for creating custom gentoo containers was purely for testing. I really need a way to seamlessly test my PR’s against gcc-13, clang-16 and musl + clang-16, while also being lazy because testing them manually meant introducing error and missing test cases. So I asked Juippis for help and I’ll try to write down what he taught me. I don’t really expect anyone else to read this and this is mainly server me for a quick guide setting up lxc container. Don’t take this one as anything more than a quick guide.
First of all, you need to install lxd on your host system. For that I would recommend heading over to the Gentoo’s lxd wiki.
Once that is done, you can follow Juippis’s guide for setting up lxd container with glibc and gcc-13 or the newest gcc available. His guide is pretty verbose and straight forward and I don’t really expect any hiccups.
Now onto the steps for creating a lxd container from stage-3 llvm tarball.
- Install distrobuilder
- create a sub-folder gentoo under folder distrobuilder (example: mkdir -p ~/distrobuilder/gentoo)
- Download the gentoo.yaml from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lxc/lxc-ci/master/images/gentoo.yaml after cd-ing into ~/distrobuilder/gentoo
- create another folder for this profile, lets say llvm (example: mkdir llvm) from inside the ~/distrobuilder/gentoo where you downloaded the gentoo.yaml
- cd into to the llvm folder
- now using distrobuilder you can create the lxd image with the following command: sudo distrobuilder build-lxd ../gentoo.yaml -o image.architecture=amd64 -o image.variant=openrc -o source.variant=llvm-openrc
- with source.variant variable you can manipulate the what is being downloaded. So the line source.variant=llvm-openrc will download the llvm openrc stage-3 tarball for creating the image.
- Once download finishes, you can import the rootfs with the following command: lxc image import lxd.tar.xz rootfs.squashfs –alias gentoo-amd64-llvm
- launch your lxc image with lxc launch gentoo-amd64-llvm gentoo-llvm-test and login into it the usual way.
- That’s it, you now have gentoo lxd image with llvm openrc profile
Note:
For using musl profile, you’ll need to modify the gentoo.yml file abit, specifially comment the following lines:
echo en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 > /etc/locale.gen locale-gen
This due to musl only uses C.UTF-8 locale.
So now have three test-pr scripts, test-pr-gcc, test-pr-clang16, and test-pr-mclang16 which I use to test my PR’s against gcc-13, clang-16 on glibc and clang-16 on musl libc repsectively.