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