EDIT: After writing this post, tyil, the maintainer of rakudo star, reached out to me and added proper OpenBSD compatibility. The portion of this post dedicated to working around the failing downloads can now be ignored, and rstar now includes a warning if the user doesn't have a login class set.
EDIT: The development version of Rakudo Star targets Rakudo 2020.07
instead of 2020.02, which has uses even more memory than the staff
login class is allowed. You may need to edit /etc/login.conf and
change this line.
--- login.conf Wed Jul 29 17:54:15 2020
+++ login.conf.new Wed Jul 29 17:54:38 2020
@@ -71,7 +71,7 @@
# Staff have fewer restrictions and can login even when nologins are set.
#
staff:\
- :datasize-cur=1536M:\
+ :datasize-cur=2536M:\
:datasize-max=infinity:\
:maxproc-max=512:\
:maxproc-cur=256:\
Or you can set a higher memory limit if you're using the staff class
using ulimit -m.
I really enjoy using raku to write small scripts for system maintenance and text parsing. Its regex and grammar engine are next level! The problem with using it on OpenBSD is that the packaged version is a couple years out of date. The version in ports is from 2018, which contains a bug regarding NativeCall on OpenBSD. Not to mention it's missing a lot of performance gains and patches.
Instead of just compiling everything from source and installing them
myself as I did on my last system, I installed it using the rakudo
star distribution and its rstar command. Rakudo Star is raku plus
some community modules and the zef package manager. It also comes
with the rstar command, which helps you in the build process.
Unfortunately, the first thing I had to do was install bash, as that
is what the rstar command is written in.
doas pkg_add bash
After installing bash, I came across a problem. Running ./bin/rstar
fetch fetches all of the materials required to compile and assemble
the star distribution, and while all of the community modules were
successfully retrieved using git, it failed to pull in all 3 major
source components. MoarVM, nqp, and rakudo, are pulled in as
gzipped tarballs, each of them failing to download. I suspect it's an
issue with something in the bash scripts. Tar also throws a warning
about one of its arguments, which has to do with the script using a
GNU tar specific command.
[2020-07-25T05:25:33] [NOTIC] Downloading https://www.moarvm.org/releases/MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.IMPt8mIFoC
tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched:
--strip-components=1
[2020-07-25T05:25:34] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/moarvm-2020.02.1
[2020-07-25T05:25:34] [NOTIC] Downloading https://github.com/perl6/nqp/releases/download/2020.02.1/nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.zDxiGW2Sxq
tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched:
--strip-components=1
[2020-07-25T05:25:40] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/nqp-2020.02.1
[2020-07-25T05:25:40] [NOTIC] Downloading https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/releases/download/2020.02.1/rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz to /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.W1mRYHVj1C
tar: WARNING! These patterns were not matched:
--strip-components=1
[2020-07-25T05:25:46] [CRIT] Failed to download /home/dante/star/src/rakudo-2020.02.1
To work around this I downloaded the required files manually using
OpenBSD's ftp command and extracted them into the src directory
that had been created by the script. A small caveat is that MoarVM
automatically extracts into a directory called MoarVM-2020.02.1,
which needs to be completely lower-cased for the rstar to work.
cd src
ftp https://www.moarvm.org/releases/MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz
ftp https://github.com/perl6/nqp/releases/download/2020.02.1/nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz
ftp https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/releases/download/2020.02.1/rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf MoarVM-2020.02.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf nqp-2020.02.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf rakudo-2020.02.1.tar.gz
mv MoarVM-2020.02.1 moarvm-2020.02.1
rm *.tar.gz
cd ..
Running rstar install then began compiling things. rstar install
will install rakudo star into the build directory by default, but you
can change that with -p to specify a prefix location.
MoarVM and nqp both compiled and installed fine, but when it came to compiling Rakudo, it failed with a memory allocation error message.
+++ Generating gen/moar/Compiler.nqp
+++ Generating gen/moar/Optimizer.nqp
+++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Optimizer.moarvm
+++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Compiler.moarvm
+++ Compiling rakudo.moarvm
+++ Generating gen/moar/BOOTSTRAP/v6c.nqp
+++ Generating gen/moar/Metamodel.nqp
+++ Compiling blib/Perl6/Metamodel.moarvm
+++ Compiling blib/Perl6/BOOTSTRAP/v6c.moarvm
+++ Compiling blib/CORE.c.setting.moarvm
The following step can take a long time, please be patient.
Stage start : 0.000
MoarVM panic: Memory allocation failed; could not allocate 84800 bytes
*** Error 1 in /home/dante/star/tmp/tmp.gqTyPvsgV1 (Makefile:800 'blib/CORE.c.setting.moarvm': @'/home/dante/star/bin/moar' --libpath='/home...)
[2020-07-25T05:38:43] [ALERT] Build failed!I tried then manually building rakudo to see if I could figure out what the problem was.
cd src/rakudo-2020.02.1
./Configure.pl --prefix /home/dante/star/
make
While rakudo was compiling, I monitored memory usage in a separate
tmux pane, and noticed that the moarvm process was using around
760 MB of RAM before it crashed. 768 MB is the maximum amount of ram a
process can use in OpenBSD when run by a user with the default login
class, as specified in /etc/login.conf.
To remedy the problem, I changed my user's class to staff, which
grants it a much higher datasize limit, among a couple other
things. If you're interested about how this works, you can check out
login.conf(5) and the /etc/login.conf file on your system.
doas usermod -L staff dante
After setting my login class, and logging out and back in, I restarted
the build and install using the rstar install command as before,
just to make sure it sets everything up how it wants.
After about half an hour of compilation, I was finally presented the following message.
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] Rakudo Star has been installed into /home/dante/star!
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] The installation took 0h 25m 02s.
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO]
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] You may need to add the following paths to your $PATH:
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/bin
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/site/bin
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/vendor/bin
[2020-07-25T06:34:06] [INFO] /home/dante/star/share/perl6/core/binAlright!
I added the specified directories to my path by editing ~/.profile
and inserting the following line.
--- .profile Sat Jul 25 06:42:48 2020
+++ .profile Sat Jul 25 06:42:31 2020
@@ -3,4 +3,5 @@
# sh/ksh initialization
PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games
+PATH=$PATH:/home/dante/star/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/site/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/vendor/bin:/home/dante/star/share/perl6/core/bin
export PATH HOME TERM
I chose to keep it in the /home/dante/star directory instead of
installing it to /usr/local in case the version of rakudo in ports
gets updated some time.
I now have an up to date version of raku running on my OpenBSD machine!