Introduction to Rust
The Rust programming language is
designed to be a safe, concurrent, practical language.
As with many other programming languages, rustc (the rust compiler)
needs a binary from which to bootstrap. It will download a stage0
binary at the start of the build, so you must have an internet
connection to build this package.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
Although BLFS usually installs in /usr, when you later upgrade to a newer version
of rust the old libraries in
/usr/lib/rustlib will remain, with
various hashes in their names, but they will not be usable and
will waste space. The editors recommend placing the files in the
/opt directory. In particular, if
you have to rebuild this package with a modified configuration
(e.g. using the shipped LLVM after building with shared LLVM,
perhaps to compile crates for architectures which the BLFS LLVM
build does not support), it is possible for the installation to
leave a broken cargo program. If this occurs,
you should either remove the existing installation first, or use
a different prefix such as /opt/rustc-1.93.1-build2.
If you prefer, you can of course change the prefix to
/usr.
The current rustbuild build system
will use all processors, although it does not scale well and often
falls back to just using one core while waiting for a library to
compile. However it can be mostly limited to a specified number of
processors by a combination of adding the switch --jobs <N> (e.g. '--jobs 4' to limit to 4
processors) on each invocation of ./x.py and using the CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=<N> environment variable. At
the moment, this is not effective when some of the rustc tests are
run.
The current version of rust's num_cpus crate now recognizes that
cgroups can be used to restrict which processors it is allowed to
use. If your machine lacks DRAM (typically, less than 2 GB DRAM per
core), that might be an alternative to taking CPUs offline. Read
the section
called “Use Linux Control Group to Limit the Resource Usage”
for information on how to use a cgroup.
At the moment, Rust does not
provide any guarantees of a stable ABI.
Note
Rustc defaults to building for ALL supported architectures, using
a shipped copy of LLVM. In BLFS, the build is only for the X86
architecture. If you are going to develop rust crates, this build
may not be sufficient for your purposes.
The build times of this version when repeated on the same machine
are often reasonably consistent, but as with all compilations
using rustc, there
can be some very slow outliers.
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages
properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most
recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
-
Download (HTTP): https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rustc-1.93.1-src.tar.xz
-
Download MD5 sum: 65de3c1b0a9304b16ff27433a0dafb95
-
Download size: 258 MB
-
Estimated disk space required: 10 GB (324 MB installed); add
11 GB if running the tests
-
Estimated build time: 10 SBU (including download time; add 15
SBU for tests, both using parallelism=8)
Rust Dependencies
Required
CMake-4.2.3 and cURL-8.18.0
Note
An Internet connection is needed for building this package. The
system certificate store may need to be set up with make-ca-1.16.1 before building this package.
Recommended
libssh2-1.11.1 and LLVM-21.1.8 (built with -D
LLVM_LINK_LLVM_DYLIB=ON so that rust can link to the system
installed version of LLVM instead of building its shipped version)
Note
If a recommended dependency is not installed, you will need to
modify the instructions to build and use a shipped copy in the
Rustc source tarball instead. See the Command Explanations
section for more details.
Optional
GDB-17.1 (used
by the test suite if it is present), git-2.53.0 (required by the test
suite), cranelift,
jemalloc,
libgccjit (read the Command Explanations in GCC-15.2.0), and libgit2
Editor Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/rust
Installation of Rust
To install into the /opt directory,
remove any existing /opt/rustc
symlink and create a new directory (i.e. with a different name if
trying a modified build of the same version). As the root user:
mkdir -pv /opt/rustc-1.93.1 &&
ln -svfn rustc-1.93.1 /opt/rustc
Note
If multiple versions of Rust are
installed in /opt, changing to
another version only requires changing the /opt/rustc symbolic link and then running
ldconfig.
Create a suitable bootstrap.toml file
which will configure the build.
cat << EOF > bootstrap.toml
# See bootstrap.toml.example for more possible options,
# and see src/bootstrap/defaults/bootstrap.dist.toml for a few options
# automatically set when building from a release tarball
# (unfortunately, we have to override many of them).
# Tell x.py that the editors have reviewed the content of this file
# and updated it to follow the major changes of the building system,
# so x.py will not warn users to rewiew that information.
change-id = 148795
[llvm]
# When using the system installed copy of LLVM, prefer the shared libraries
link-shared = true
# If building the shipped LLVM source, only enable the x86 target
# instead of all the targets supported by LLVM.
targets = "X86"
[build]
description = "for BLFS r12.4-1278"
# Omit the documentation to save time and space (the default is to build them).
docs = false
# Do not look for new versions of the dependencies online.
locked-deps = true
# Only install these extended tools. Cargo, clippy, rustdoc, and rustfmt
# are installed by a default rustup installation, and rust-src is needed
# to build the Rust code in Linux kernel (in case you need such a kernel
# feature).
tools = ["cargo", "clippy", "rustdoc", "rustfmt", "src"]
[install]
prefix = "/opt/rustc-1.93.1"
docdir = "share/doc/rustc-1.93.1"
[rust]
channel = "stable"
# Enable the same optimizations as the official upstream build.
lto = "thin"
codegen-units = 1
# Don't build llvm-bitcode-linker which is only useful for the NVPTX
# backend that we don't enable.
llvm-bitcode-linker = false
[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
llvm-config = "/usr/bin/llvm-config"
[target.i686-unknown-linux-gnu]
llvm-config = "/usr/bin/llvm-config"
EOF
Compile Rust by running the
following commands:
export LIBSSH2_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG=1
export LIBSQLITE3_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG=1
./x.py build
Note
The test suite will generate some messages in the system log for traps on invalid opcodes, and for
segmentation faults. In themselves these are nothing to worry
about, and they are just a way for a test to be terminated.
To run the tests, issue:
./x.py test --verbose --no-fail-fast | tee rustc-testlog
The test named tests/run-make/rustdoc-target-modifiers is known
to fail because we've not enabled the AArch64 target in LLVM-21.1.8.
As with all large test suites, some tests might fail on some
machines - if the number of additional failures is low, check the
log for 'failures:' and review lines above that, particularly the
'stderr:' lines. Any mention of a SIGSEGV or signal 11 in a failing
test is a cause for concern.
Note
If you've stripped /usr/lib/libc.a
with strip
--strip-unneeded, all statically-linked Rust
programs will crash with SIGSEGV on start-up, causing several
tests (for example tests/ui/process/nofile-limit.rs) to fail with
SIGSEGV.
It's caused by a Glibc bug affecting Glibc-2.42 and several prior
releases, so for now we've replaced --strip-unneeded with --strip-debug in both the LFS book
and the section called “Stripping One More
Time” to work around the problem. If you hit this issue,
rebuild Glibc and replace the /usr/lib/libc.a file with the unstripped
libc.a from the fresh build.
If you get any other failing
test which reports an issue number then you should search for that
issue. For example, when rustc >= 1.41.1 was built with a
version of sysllvm before 10.0 the test for issue 69225 failed
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/69225
and that should be regarded as a critical failure (they released
1.41.1 because of it). Most other failures will not be critical.
Therefore, you should determine the number of failures. The number
of tests which passed and failed can be found by running:
grep '^test result:' rustc-testlog |
awk '{sum1 += $4; sum2 += $6} END { print sum1 " passed; " sum2 " failed" }'
The other available fields are $8 for those which were ignored
(i.e. skipped), $10 for 'measured' and $12 for 'filtered out' but
both those last two are probably zero.
Now, as the root user, install the
package:
Note
If sudo or
su is invoked for
switching to the root user,
ensure LIBSSH2_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG and
LIBSQLITE3_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG are
correctly passed or the following command may rebuild
cargo with shipped
copies of libssh2 and sqlite. For sudo, use the --preserve-env=LIB{SSH2,SQLITE3}_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG
option. For su, do
not use the - or --login options.
./x.py install
Still as the root user, fix the
installation of the documentation, symlink a Zsh completion file into the correct location,
and move a Bash completion file
into the location recommended by the Bash completion maintainers:
rm -fv /opt/rustc-1.93.1/share/doc/rustc-1.93.1/*.old &&
install -vm644 README.md \
/opt/rustc-1.93.1/share/doc/rustc-1.93.1 &&
install -vdm755 /usr/share/zsh/site-functions &&
ln -sfv /opt/rustc/share/zsh/site-functions/_cargo \
/usr/share/zsh/site-functions
mv -v /etc/bash_completion.d/cargo /usr/share/bash-completion/completions
Finally, unset the exported environment variables:
unset LIB{SSH2,SQLITE3}_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG
Command Explanations
ln -svfn rustc-1.93.1
/opt/rustc: if this is not the first use of the
/opt/rustc symlink, overwrite it by
force, and use the '-n' flag to avoid getting confusing results
from e.g. ls -l.
tools = ["cargo", "clippy", "rustdoc",
"rustfmt"]: only build the tools from the 'default' profile
from the binary command rustup which are recommended for
most users. The other tools are unlikely to be useful unless using
(old) code analyzers or editing the standard library.
channel = "stable": this ensures that
only stable features are used. The default in bootstrap.toml is to use development features,
which are not appropriate for a released version of rust.
[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]: the
syntax of bootstrap.toml requires an
llvm-config entry for each target for
which system-llvm is to be used. Change the target to [target.i686-unknown-linux-gnu] if you are
building on 32-bit x86. This whole section should be omitted if you
wish to build against the shipped llvm, but the resulting build
will be larger and take longer.
export
LIBSSH2_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG=1: Allow cargo to link to the system
installed copy of libssh2. Omit this command if you've not
installed libssh2-1.11.1.
export
LIBSQLITE3_SYS_USE_PKG_CONFIG=1: Allow cargo to link to the system
installed copy of sqlite.
--verbose: this switch can
sometimes provide more information about a test which fails.
--no-fail-fast: this switch
ensures that the test suite will not stop at the first error.