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