Installing the TAIL OS SDK

The SDK is what you build TAIL OS applications with: the portable OS and the toolchain that targets it. It needs no TAIL OS source and no cross-compiler — the bundled toolchain links with its own rust-lld.

TAIL OS ships as two artifacts. The SDK here is board-agnostic: install it once and the same install serves every board. A bootable image for a specific board is built from a separate per-board BSP against this SDK.

To try TAIL OS without installing anything, see the Quick Start: it boots a prebuilt image in QEMU with one script.

1. Prerequisites


Linux on x86-64	The bundled toolchain runs there
`rustup`	The installer registers the bundled toolchain with it: rustup.rs
`curl` and `tar`	Usually preinstalled

QEMU is needed only to boot an image, not to build applications: sudo apt-get install -y qemu-system-arm qemu-utils.

2. Download

curl -O https://tail-os.com/downloads/tail-sdk-installer-0.1.0.tar.gz
curl -O https://tail-os.com/downloads/SHA256SUMS
sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

The bundle is 289 MiB: it carries the toolchain and the portable OS, so nothing is fetched during installation.

3. Install

tar xzf tail-sdk-installer-0.1.0.tar.gz
cd tail-sdk-installer-0.1.0
./install.sh --prefix ~/tail-sdk

install.sh copies the toolchain and the portable OS into the directory you name, registers the toolchain with rustup as tail_release pointing there, and writes ~/tail-sdk/tail-sdk-env.sh, which exports TAIL_SDK (the SDK tree inside the install, ~/tail-sdk/sdk/tail-sdk-0.1.0). It finishes by compiling and linking a throwaway program, so a successful run means the next step works. The extracted bundle is disposable afterwards.

Run it without --prefix to be prompted for the directory, with --profile to add the env file to your shell startup, and with --force to reinstall over an existing install.

4. Build an application

cargo +tail_release new my_app && cd my_app
cargo +tail_release build --target aarch64-unknown-tail

That produces an AArch64 ELF for TAIL OS with no further configuration. The +tail_release selects the installed toolchain; rustup default tail_release makes a bare cargo build use it.

Application builds need nothing else. TAIL_SDK matters only when building a board BSP, whose verify-sdk.sh reads it:

source ~/tail-sdk/tail-sdk-env.sh

Where next

The periodic framework in Rust and in Python: the API for periodic applications, with examples.
Quick Start: boot a prebuilt image in QEMU.
Running TAIL OS in QEMU and on a Raspberry Pi 3.