Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
245 lines (168 loc) · 7.93 KB

build-unix.md

File metadata and controls

245 lines (168 loc) · 7.93 KB
Raw

UNIX BUILD NOTES

Some notes on how to build Bitcoin in Unix.

Note

Always use absolute paths to configure and compile bitcoin and the dependencies, for example, when specifying the the path of the dependency:

../dist/configure --enable-cxx --disable-shared --with-pic --prefix=$BDB_PREFIX

Here BDB_PREFIX must absolute path - it is defined using $(pwd) which ensures the usage of the absolute path.

To Build

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install # optional

This will build bitcoin-qt as well if the dependencies are met.

Dependencies

These dependencies are required:

Library Purpose Description
libssl Crypto Random Number Generation, Elliptic Curve Cryptography
libboost Utility Library for threading, data structures, etc
libcurl cURL Data Transfer Library
libevent Networking OS independent asynchronous networking

Optional dependencies:

Library Purpose Description
miniupnpc UPnP Support Firewall-jumping support
libdb4.8 Berkeley DB Wallet storage (only needed when wallet enabled)
qt GUI GUI toolkit (only needed when GUI enabled)
protobuf Payments in GUI Data interchange format used for payment protocol (only needed when GUI enabled)
libqrencode QR codes in GUI Optional for generating QR codes (only needed when GUI enabled)

For the versions used in the release, see release-process.md under Fetch and build inputs.

System requirements

C++ compilers are memory-hungry. It is recommended to have at least 1 GB of memory available when compiling chain2. With 512MB of memory or less compilation will take much longer due to swap thrashing.

Dependency Build Instructions: Ubuntu & Debian

Build requirements:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool autotools-dev autoconf pkg-config libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libevent-dev

for Ubuntu 12.04 and later or Debian 7 and later libboost-all-dev has to be installed:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

Ubuntu 12.04 and later have packages for libdb5.1-dev and libdb5.1++-dev, but using these will break binary wallet compatibility, and is not recommended.

for Debian: See section Berkeley DB for db4.8 installation instructions.

Optional:

sudo apt-get install libminiupnpc-dev (see --with-miniupnpc and --enable-upnp-default)

Dependencies for the GUI: Ubuntu & Debian

If you want to build Bitcoin-Qt, make sure that the required packages for Qt development are installed. Either Qt 4 or Qt 5 are necessary to build the GUI. If both Qt 4 and Qt 5 are installed, Qt 4 will be used. Pass --with-gui=qt5 to configure to choose Qt5. To build without GUI pass --without-gui.

To build with Qt 4 you need the following:

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler

For Qt 5 you need the following:

sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler

libqrencode (optional) can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install libqrencode-dev

Once these are installed, they will be found by configure and a bitcoin-qt executable will be built by default.

Notes

The release is built with GCC and then "strip bitcoind" to strip the debug symbols, which reduces the executable size by about 90%.

miniupnpc

miniupnpc may be used for UPnP port mapping. It can be downloaded from here. UPnP support is compiled in and turned off by default. See the configure options for upnp behavior desired:

--without-miniupnpc      No UPnP support miniupnp not required
--disable-upnp-default   (the default) UPnP support turned off by default at runtime
--enable-upnp-default    UPnP support turned on by default at runtime

To build:

tar -xzvf miniupnpc-1.6.tar.gz
cd miniupnpc-1.6
make
sudo su
make install

Berkeley DB

It is recommended to use Berkeley DB 4.8. If you have to build it yourself, you can use the installation script included in contrib/ like so

./contrib/install_db4.sh `pwd`

from the root of the repository.

Note: You only need Berkeley DB if the wallet is enabled (see the section Disable-Wallet mode below).

Boost

If you need to build Boost yourself:

sudo su
./bootstrap.sh
./bjam install

Security

To help make your bitcoin installation more secure by making certain attacks impossible to exploit even if a vulnerability is found, binaries are hardened by default. This can be disabled with:

Hardening Flags:

./configure --enable-hardening
./configure --disable-hardening

Hardening enables the following features:

  • Position Independent Executable Build position independent code to take advantage of Address Space Layout Randomization offered by some kernels. Attackers who can cause execution of code at an arbitrary memory location are thwarted if they don't know where anything useful is located. The stack and heap are randomly located by default but this allows the code section to be randomly located as well.

    On an AMD64 processor where a library was not compiled with -fPIC, this will cause an error such as: "relocation R_X86_64_32 against `......' can not be used when making a shared object;"

    To test that you have built PIE executable, install scanelf, part of paxutils, and use:

      scanelf -e ./bitcoin

    The output should contain: TYPE ET_DYN

  • Non-executable Stack If the stack is executable then trivial stack based buffer overflow exploits are possible if vulnerable buffers are found. By default, bitcoin should be built with a non-executable stack but if one of the libraries it uses asks for an executable stack or someone makes a mistake and uses a compiler extension which requires an executable stack, it will silently build an executable without the non-executable stack protection.

    To verify that the stack is non-executable after compiling use: scanelf -e ./bitcoin

    the output should contain: STK/REL/PTL RW- R-- RW-

    The STK RW- means that the stack is readable and writeable but not executable.

Disable-wallet mode

When the intention is to run only a P2P node without a wallet, bitcoin may be compiled in disable-wallet mode with:

./configure --disable-wallet

In this case there is no dependency on Berkeley DB 4.8.

Mining is also possible in disable-wallet mode, but only using the getblocktemplate RPC call not getwork.

Additional Configure Flags

A list of additional configure flags can be displayed with:

./configure --help

Building on FreeBSD

(Updated as of FreeBSD 11.0)

Clang is installed by default as cc compiler, this makes it easier to get started than on OpenBSD. Installing dependencies:

pkg install autoconf automake libtool pkgconf
pkg install boost-libs openssl libevent
pkg install gmake

You need to use GNU make (gmake) instead of make. (libressl instead of openssl will also work)

For the wallet (optional):

./contrib/install_db4.sh `pwd`
setenv BDB_PREFIX $PWD/db4

Then build using:

./autogen.sh
./configure BDB_CFLAGS="-I${BDB_PREFIX}/include" BDB_LIBS="-L${BDB_PREFIX}/lib -ldb_cxx"
gmake

Note on debugging: The version of gdb installed by default is ancient and considered harmful. It is not suitable for debugging a multi-threaded C++ program, not even for getting backtraces. Please install the package gdb and use the versioned gdb command e.g. gdb7111.