Bugs

Bugs should be filed in our bug tracker. Questions and comments can be sent to the developer mailing list: ramcloud-dev. (As of 2019/10/7 support for RAMCloud has ended)

Necessary Tools

• GNU Make (Anything reasonably recent)
• GNU g++ (>= 4.49.6x)
• git (>= 1.6.0)
• Perl (Anything reasonably recent)
  • For mergedeps.pl, which automatically inserts included headers in source files into the make dependencies.
• Python 2.6, epydoc 
• Boost
  • If you're having issues with Boost on Ubuntu, check boost ticket #3844.
• pcre
• Doxygen 1.7.21
• protocol buffers
  • If you're getting lots of undefined reference errors during linking, it's likely that your libprotobuf is compiled with a different library ABI than RAMCloud. Check GCC's Dual ABI page and the "GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI" flag in GNUMakefile.
• ZooKeeper
• java and javac (>= 1.7.0_25)

To get a working toolchain on Debian (and probably Ubuntu), this used to be sufficient:

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Install from sources: libevent-2.0.20-stable, protobuf-2.4.1, cryptopp560, gcc-4.4.6

Here are some toolchain installation commands that have worked for other members of the community on different systems:

apt-get install build-essential git-core doxygen=1.7.1 libpcre3-dev protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev libcrypto++-dev libevent-dev libboost-all-dev libgtest-dev libzookeeper-mt-dev zookeeper libssl-dev

Source Code

For Core Developers

For those with accounts on fiz.stanford.edur+w access to the repository on GitHub, which currently hosts our git repository, clone from here for write access:

git clone sshgit@github.com://fiz.stanford.edu/git/ramcloudPlatformLab/RAMCloud.git
cd ramcloudRAMCloud
git submodule update --init --recursive
make logcabin
ln -s ../../hooks/pre-commit .git/hooks/pre-commit

(Notes: the git submodule update retrieves additional repos needed to build RAMCloud, such as gtest and logcabin; the ln -s command arranges for various consistency checks to run during commits, such as ensuring the absence of carriage returns)

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Use the same instructions as above, except replace "ssh:git@github.com:PlatformLab/RAMCloud.git" with "git:https://github.com/PlatformLab/RAMCloud.git" in the git clone command. With this approach you don't need to have an account on fizr+w access to the repository on GitHub, and you can't push commts commits to the repository. With read-only access, you can send us patches, or we can pull them from your repository.

Compiling

cd ramcloudRAMCloud   
make -j12

Object files and executables will appear in the subdirectory obj.xxx, where xxx is your current branch (typically master). By default, RAMCloud compiles with debugging symbols, which slows the system down considerably.  If you want to make performance measurements, recompile without debugging symbols:

make clean
make -j12 DEBUG=no

LogCabin

LogCabin is a distributed system that will provide a small amount of highly replicated, consistent storage. It will be used by the RAMCloud Coordinator mainly for fault tolerance. 

More information about LogCabin can be found at: https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/display/logcabin/LogCabin.

For current users of RAMCloud who have just pulled the latest commits that link RAMCloud to LogCabin, or if the LogCabin submodule is updated at any point, run:

git submodule update --init --recursive
make logcabin

CentOS Issues

This shouldn't be necessary any more on the Stanford cluster, as /etc/skel/.bashrc now includes the line. -Diego 2012-04-15

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• No commit should include changes for multiple issues. (Each commit in the push should complete or work towards a single issue.)
• Pushes should complete any issues they start, but individual commits within a push do not need to complete an issue.
• If at all possible, each commit should represent a version of the system that actually works (e.g., passes all unit tests and runs simple apps and system tests). This is important so that people can use git bisect to hunt down the commit that caused a bug: if commits are broken, git bisect won't work.
• All commit messages should be meaningful without looking at the diff. (By reading a commit message, you should get some idea of what was modified and what the intent was. If you can't fit this in one line, skip a line and then write more.)

Speed Up Build

Put the following lines in the file `private/MakefragPrivateTop`:

# Use ccache to speed up compilation by caching object
# files across compilations.
CCACHE := yes
# Use gold linker for faster linking.
LINKER := gold

Running Under Valgrind

Compiling unit test:

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  scripts/cluster.py --verbose --timeout=600 --valgrind --valgrindArgs='--leak-check=yes --leak-resolution=med --show-reachable=no --undef-value-errors=no' --client=RAM-462/ram462test

Running With Google's Sanitizers

make SANITIZER=address tests

Additional Sanity Checks

Before pushing to the master branch on fiz it is generally a good idea to make sure your changes haven't caused regressions in the recovery system.

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