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doc: Link to work on bootstrapping.

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* doc/guix.texi (Reducing the Set of Bootstrap Binaries): New section.
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Ludovic Courtès 2017-12-03 17:31:51 +01:00
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@ -20302,6 +20302,28 @@ unknown, but if you would like to investigate further (and have
significant computational and storage resources to do so), then let us significant computational and storage resources to do so), then let us
know. know.
@unnumberedsubsec Reducing the Set of Bootstrap Binaries
Our bootstrap binaries currently include GCC, Guile, etc. That's a lot
of binary code! Why is that a problem? It's a problem because these
big chunks of binary code are practically non-auditable, which makes it
hard to establish what source code produced them. Every unauditable
binary also leaves us vulnerable to compiler backdoors as described by
Ken Thompson in the 1984 paper @emph{Reflections on Trusting Trust}.
This is mitigated by the fact that our bootstrap binaries were generated
from an earlier Guix revision. Nevertheless it lacks the level of
transparency that we get in the rest of the package dependency graph,
where Guix always gives us a source-to-binary mapping. Thus, our goal
is to reduce the set of bootstrap binaries to the bare minimum.
The @uref{http://bootstrappable.org, Bootstrappable.org web site} lists
on-going projects to do that. One of these is about replacing the
bootstrap GCC with a sequence of assemblers, interpreters, and compilers
of increasing complexity, which could be built from source starting from
a simple and auditable assembler. Your help is welcome!
@node Porting @node Porting
@section Porting to a New Platform @section Porting to a New Platform