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How to Build and Run K23

Prerequisites

Building k23 needs a lot of tools (rustc, buck2, qemu, and more) at specific versions 1. Rather than ask you to chase all of these down by hand, we lean on Nix to pin them all.

This makes Nix the one thing you do have to install yourself. Grab it via the Determinate Installer or upstream nix, and enable flakes (experimental-features = nix-command flakes in ~/.config/nix/nix.conf. The Determinate Installer sets this for you).

Linux and macOS are supported on x86_64 and aarch64; on Windows you’ll want to develop from inside WSL2 as Nix doesn’t run natively there.

Entering the dev shell

With Nix installed, running nix develop -c $SHELL drops you into a shell with every required tool in PATH 2.

Running

Inside the dev shell run just run //sys:k23-qemu-riscv64 which builds k23 for riscv64 and boots it under QEMU.

Type just (no args) to list every recipe available. This includes convenient recipes for running linters, tests and more. Every recipe is a thin wrapper around buck2 (just run //sys:k23-qemu-riscv64 is roughly buck2 run //sys:k23-qemu-riscv64).

  1. We’ve had issues with wildly outdated QEMU versions in linux package repositories for example. ↩

  2. The -c $SHELL part instructs nix to use your current shell binary, otherwise it defaults to bash, yuck. ↩