The chromium build system for Linux will (by default) use a sysroot image rather than building against the libraries installed on the host system. This serves several purposes. Firstly, it ensures that binaries will run on all supported linux systems independent of the packages installed on the build machine. Secondly, it makes the build more hermetic, preventing issues that arise for variations among developers' systems.
The sysroot consists of a minimal installation of Debian/stable (or old-stable) to ensure maximum compatibility. Pre-built sysroot images are stored in Google Cloud Storage and downloaded during gclient runhooks
Installation of the sysroot is performed by build/linux/sysroot_scripts/install-sysroot.py.
This script can be run manually but is normally run as part of gclient hooks. When run from hooks this script in a no-op on non-linux platforms.
The pre-built sysroot images occasionally needs to be rebuilt. For example, when security updates to debian are released, or when a new package is needed by the chromium build.
To rebuild the images (without any changes) run the following commands:
$ cd build/linux/sysroot_scripts $ ./sysroot-creator-wheezy.sh BuildSysrootAll
The above command will rebuild the sysroot for all architectures. To build just one architecture use BuildSysroot<arch>. Run the script with no arguments for a list of possible architectures. For example:
$ ./sysroot-creator-wheezy.sh BuildSysrootAmd64
This command on its own should be a no-op and produce an image identical to the one on Google Cloud Storage.
To update packages to the latest versions run:
$ ./sysroot-creator-wheezy.sh UpdatePackageListsAll
This command will update the package lists that are stored alongside the script. If no packages have changed then this script will have no effect.
To add a new package, edit the sysroot-creator-wheezy.sh script and modify the DEBIAN_PACKAGES list, then run the update step above (UpdatePackageListsAll).
To upload images to Google Cloud Storage run the following command:
$ ./sysroot-creator-wheezy.sh UploadSysrootAll <SHA1>
Here you should use the SHA1 of the git revision at which the images were created.
Uploading new images to Google Clound Storage requires write permission on the chrome-linux-sysroot bucket.
Once new images have been uploaded the install-sysroot.py script needs to be updated to reference the new versions. This process is manual and involves updating the REVISION and SHA1SUM variables in the script.