Compiling BOINC client software

The BOINC client software includes:

• The core client
• The BOINC Manager
• boinc_cmd (Unix/Linux only)
• The BOINC screensaver (Windows and Mac only)

Unix and Linux

It is recommended to create a dedicated user for BOINC processing, e.g. boinc and perform the operations below in this user's home directory! Details depend on the system, on Linux one would do

useradd boinc
su - boinc

...to create a new user called boinc who cannot log in by default (because he has no password), then switch to that user.

First, download and install the prerequisites, then download the current source.

You should then have a directory called maybe "boinc-client_release-7.4-7.4.41".

cd to that directory and issue the command

./_autosetup

If this generates errors, check the prerequisites again. On success, consider reading the output of

./configure --help

Local use

If you want to build the client software for local use on your machine only, configure the build process using:

WHERE_BOINC_WILL_GO=/where/boinc/will/go
./configure --prefix=$WHERE_BOINC_WILL_GO --disable-server --disable-manager --disable-fcgi --enable-optimize

• WHERE_BOINC_WILL_GO is the name of the target directory. Often chosen as /usr/local/boinc, but consider using ~boinc/boinc if you have a dedicated boinc user.
• According to ./configure --help, the command ./configure --enable-pkg-client should mean 'build a client package' but doing it that way will result in the error "cannot find the library `../lib/libboinc_crypt.la'".
• Special flags can be passed to the compiler: for example one might add CXXFLAGS="-O3" to the ./configure options. Indications whether this is actually useful are hard to come by though. With --enable-optimize, the CXXFLAGS are set to CXXFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -ffast-math -O3 in the Makefile.
• If you have old versions of libraries (curl, openssl etc.) in /usr/lib, and newer versions somewhere else (for example, /usr/local/lib) you may need to tell the linker where to find the newer versions by adding the LDFLAGS options, as in LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

If ./configure ended with success, you can now start the actual build process:

make

Once this has succeeded, you may either install the result to the directory given previously to ./configure by issuing

make install

This will probably fail because.

/bin/install: cannot create regular file ‘/etc/init.d/boinc-client’: Permission denied

The installer tries to put an "init file" into /etc/init.d/ to start boinc client at boot time. This is not a good idea because

1 This works only if you are currently root, and shouldn't be root when building. On the other hand, if you install boinc to /usr/local/boinc, you will have to issue make install as root anyway. 2 Your system may well be running systemd and no longer use System V-style init files.

Solution: Remove the make target install-exec-hook from the make target install-exec-am by editing client/scripts/Makefile

install-exec-am:
        @$(NORMAL_INSTALL)
        $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) install-exec-hook

to

install-exec-am:
        @$(NORMAL_INSTALL)
#        $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) install-exec-hook

Distribution package

Alternatively, you may want to create a distribution package:

cd packages/generic/sea/
make

Note that making the distribution package fails if not everything has been built:

cp: cannot stat ‘../../../stage/FOO/bin/boincmgr’: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat ‘../../../stage/FOO/bin/boincscr’: No such file or directory

Fake the presence of those files:

touch ../../../stage/FOO/bin/boincmgr
touch ../../../stage/FOO/bin/boincscr

The results can now be found in the sea directory: located under the folder BOINC and there is also a sea.tar file as well as a self-extracting archive e.g. boinc_7.4.41_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.sh

Portable binaries

If instead you intend to build hopefully portable statically linked binaries of the client software that should run on a wide variety of GNU/Linux platforms, it is recommended to build the client software using a virtual machine (e.g. running under Microsoft Virtual PC, download the Compatibility virtual machine image).

In this case you should build using the option --enable-client-release

./_autosetup
./configure --disable-server --enable-client-release --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu \
    CXXFLAGS="-O3 -funroll-loops -fforce-addr -ffast-math"
make

See details of the build system.

Windows

Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition Build Environment

Software Prerequisites:

• Download and install ​Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition.
• Download the BOINC source code.
• Download the Visual Studio 2013 Dependency Store.
  • All dependency stores can be found here.

All the Visual Studio project files assume that the dependency store is a sibling of the BOINC source repo. An example directory layout would look like this:

C:\Src
|
+--+ boinc
|
+--+ boinc_depends_win_vs2013

Building via the Command Line

Most everything developers will need to do during release management is handled by batch files. All these collections of batch files depend on the BOINC Build Environment for Windows.

Launching the BOINC Build Environment for Windows:

cd \src\boinc\win_build
buildenv type release platform x64

Buildenv accepts several different parameters to customize what you are going to be able to build. Command parameters are as follows:

Initializing BOINC Build Environment for Windows
Usage: buildenv.cmd TYPE <type> PLATFORM <platform> [Optional Commands]

  Commands:
    DEVENVDIR:  Which build environment executed this batch file.
    TYPE:  Which build environment are you building executables for.
      Current Values: Release/Debug
    PLATFORM: Which platform are you building for.
      Current Values: x86/amd64/ia64

You should get this output on success:

Initializing BOINC Build Environment for Windows
Software Platform Detected: Visual Studio 2013

To build everything, execute 'build all' from the build environment:

C:\Src\boinc>build all
Building the World...
  Building BOINC:
    Success
  Building BOINC Manager:
    Success
  Building BOINC Command:
    Success
  Building BOINC Screen Saver:
    Success
  Building BOINC Screen Saver Controller:
    Success
  Building BOINC Service Controller:
    Success
  Building BOINC System Tray:
    Success

Building via Visual Studio

Double-click on the boinc_vs2013.sln file in the win_build directory to launch Visual Studio 2013. From here you should be able to perform any build operation you want.

Mac OS X

Instructions for building the BOINC client on Mac OS X are on a separate page.