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1 IF YOU HAVE A BINARY DISTRIBUTION:
3 The two files that SBCL needs to run, at minimum, are sbcl and sbcl.core.
4 They are in
5 src/runtime/sbcl
6 and
7 output/sbcl.core
9 sbcl is a standard executable, built by compiling and linking an
10 ordinary C program. It provides the runtime environment for the
11 running Lisp image, but it doesn't know much about high-level Lisp
12 stuff (like symbols and printing and objects) so it's pretty useless
13 by itself. sbcl.core is a dump file written in a special SBCL format
14 which only sbcl understands, and it contains all the high-level Lisp
15 stuff.
17 In order to get a usable system, you need to run sbcl in a way that
18 it can find sbcl.core. There are three ways for it to find
19 sbcl.core:
21 1. by default, in /usr/lib/sbcl/sbcl.core or /usr/local/lib/sbcl/sbcl.core
22 2. by environment variable:
23 $ export SBCL_HOME=/foo/bar/
24 $ sbcl
25 3. by command line option:
26 $ sbcl --core /foo/bar/sbcl.core"
27 The usual, recommended approach is method #1. Method #2 is useful if
28 you're installing SBCL on a system in your user account, instead of
29 installing SBCL on an entire system. Method #3 is mostly useful for
30 testing or other special cases.
32 So: the standard installation procedure is
33 1. Copy sbcl.core to /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib.
34 2. Copy sbcl to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.
35 3. Copy the contrib modules that you're using (if any) to the same place
36 as sbcl.core
37 4. Optionally copy sbcl.1 to /usr/man/man1 or /usr/local/man/man1.
39 The script install.sh does all of this for you, including compilation
40 of all contrib modules it can find, and installation of all those that
41 pass their tests. You should set the INSTALL_ROOT environment
42 variable to /usr or /usr/local as appropriate before starting
43 install.sh: e.g.
45 # INSTALL_ROOT=/usr/local sh install.sh
47 or
49 $ INSTALL_ROOT=/home/me/sbcl sh install.sh
51 IF YOU HAVE A SOURCE DISTRIBUTION:
53 This software has been built successfully on these systems:
54 cpu = x86 (Intel 386 or higher, or compatibles like the AMD K6)
55 os = Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 with libc >= 2.1
56 host lisp = CMU CL 2.4.17
57 host lisp = SBCL itself
58 os = RedHat Linux 6.2
59 host lisp = SBCL itself
60 os = FreeBSD 3.4 or 4.0
61 host lisp = CMU CL
62 host lisp = SBCL itself
63 os = OpenBSD 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, and 3.0
64 host lisp = SBCL itself
65 cpu = alpha
66 os = Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 with libc >= 2.1
67 host lisp = SBCL itself
68 os = Tru64 5.1
69 host lisp = SBCL itself
70 cpu = sparc
71 os = Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 with libc >= 2.2
72 host lisp = SBCL itself
73 os = Solaris 8
74 host lisp = SBCL itself
75 cpu = powerpc
76 os = Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 with libc >= 2.1
77 host lisp = OpenMCL 0.12
78 host lisp = SBCL itself
80 It is known not to build under CLISP (as of early June 2002) because
81 of bugs in the CLISP garbage collector.
83 Reports of other systems that it works on (or doesn't work on, for
84 that matter), or help in making it run on more systems, would be
85 appreciated.
87 CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION
88 SBCL, like CMU CL, overcommits memory. That is, it
89 asks the OS for more virtual memory address space than
90 it actually intends to use, and the OS is expected to
91 optimistically give it this address space even if the OS
92 doesn't have enough RAM+swap to back it up. This works
93 fine as long as SBCL's memory usage pattern is sparse
94 enough that the OS can actually implement the requested
95 VM usage. Unfortunately, if the OS runs out of RAM+swap to
96 implement the requested VM usage, things get bad. On many
97 systems, including the Linux 2.2.13 kernel that I used for
98 development of SBCL up to version 0.6.0, the kernel kills
99 processes more-or-less randomly when it runs out of
100 resources. You may think your Linux box is very stable, but
101 it is unlikely to be stable if this happens.:-| So be sure
102 to have enough memory available when you build the system.
103 (This can be considered a bug in SBCL, or a bug in the
104 Unix overcommitment-of-memory architecture, or both. It's
105 not clear what the best fix is. On the SBCL side, Peter Van
106 Eynde has a lazy-allocation patch for CMU CL that lets
107 it run without overcommitting memory, and that could be
108 ported to SBCL, but unfortunately that might introduce
109 new issues, e.g. alien programs allocating memory in the
110 address space that SBCL thinks of as its own, and later
111 getting trashed when SBCL lazily allocates the memory.
112 On the OS side, there might be some way to address the
113 problem with quotas, I don't know.)
115 To build the system binaries:
116 0. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, you can update your
117 sources to the latest development snapshot (or any previous
118 development snapshot, for that matter) by using anonymous CVS
119 to SourceForge. (This is not recommended if you're just using SBCL
120 as a tool for other work, but if you're interested in working on
121 SBCL itself, it's a good idea.) Follow the "CVS Repository" link on
122 <http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbcl> for instructions.
123 1. Make sure that you have enough RAM+swap to build SBCL, as
124 per the CAUTION note above. (As of version 0.6.0, the most
125 memory-intensive operation in make.sh is the second call to
126 GENESIS, which makes the Lisp image grow to around 128 Mb RAM+swap.
127 2. If the GNU make command is not available under the names "gmake"
128 or "make", then define the environment variable GNUMAKE to a name
129 where it can be found.
130 3. If you like, you can tweak the *FEATURES* set for the resulting
131 Lisp system, enabling or disabling features like documentation
132 strings or extra debugging code. The preferred way to do this is
133 by creating a file "customize-target-features.lisp", containing
134 a lambda expression which is applied to the default *FEATURES*
135 set and which returns the new *FEATURES* set, e.g.
136 (LAMBDA (LIST)
137 (ADJOIN :SB-SHOW
138 (REMOVE :SB-DOC
139 LIST)))
140 (This is the preferred way because it lets local changes interact
141 cleanly with CVS changes to the main, global source tree.)
142 4. Run "sh make.sh" in the same directory where you unpacked the
143 tarball. If you don't already have a SBCL binary installed
144 as "sbcl" in your path, you'll need to tell make.sh what Lisp
145 system to use as the cross-compilation host. (To use CMU CL
146 as the cross-compilation host, run "sh make.sh 'lisp -batch'",
147 assuming CMU CL has been installed under its default name "lisp".)
148 5. Wait. This can be a slow process. On my test machines, the
149 wall clock time for a build of sbcl-0.6.7 was approximately
150 1.5 hours on a 450MHz K6/3 with 248Mb RAM, running RH Linux 6.2;
151 4 hours on a 200MHz Pentium (P54C) with 64Mb RAM, running FreeBSD 4.0;
152 13 hours on a 133MHz Pentium (P54C) with 48Mb RAM, running OpenBSD 2.6.
153 Around the 48Mb mark, the build process is starved for RAM:
154 on my 48Mb OpenBSD machine with nothing else running, it
155 spent about 2/3 of its wall clock time swapping.
157 Now you should have the same src/runtime/sbcl and output/sbcl.core
158 files that come with the binary distribution, and you can install
159 them as in the "IF YOU HAVE A BINARY DISTRIBUTION" instructions (above).
161 To convert the DocBook version of the system documentation (files
162 ending in .sgml) to more-readable form (HTML or text):
163 DocBook is an abstract markup system based on SGML. It's intended
164 to be automatically translated to other formats. Tools to do this
165 exist on the web, and are becoming increasingly easy to find as
166 more free software projects move their documentation to DocBook.
167 Any one of these systems should work with the SBCL documentation.
168 If you'd like to have the documentation produced in the same
169 format as appears in the binary distribution, and you have
170 the jade binary and Norman Walsh's modular DSSSL stylesheets
171 installed, you can try the doc/make-doc.sh script. Otherwise,
172 your formatted copy of the SBCL documentation should have the
173 same content as in the binary distribution, but details of
174 presentation will probably vary.