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I'm trying to compile v0.8.6 of the core client from source, in order to compare IDB (Initial Blockchain Download) performance between versions.

I created a fresh Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 machine on Amazon EC2. I then ran the following commands (which were sufficient for version 0.9.3 and up):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf libboost-all-dev \
                     libssl-dev libtool pkg-config libevent-dev

In addition for this specific version I ran:

sudo apt-get install libdb++-dev libminiupnpc-dev

I then checked out the source and started the compilation:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin
git checkout v0.8.6
cd src/
make -f makefile.unix

I'm only interested in running headless bitcoind, but I'm not sure if it was already separated form the UI at that release.

I get the following error:

rpcrawtransaction.cpp:241:77:   required from here
/usr/include/boost/variant/get.hpp:178:5: error: invalid application of ‘sizeof’ to incomplete type ‘boost::STATIC_ASSERTION_FAILURE<false>’
 BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT_MSG(
 ^
makefile.unix:172: recipe for target 'obj/rpcrawtransaction.o' failed
make: *** [obj/rpcrawtransaction.o] Error 1

Interestingly 0.7, 0.6 and 0.5 do compile successfully, although they get stuck during IDB, so perhaps compilation just failed silently. I'll make a separate post for those later.

I suspect that I need to install some very specific versions of dependencies, but I'm not sure which and how to go about that. I haven't used Linux in years.

I still have the VM, so I can provide more details if needed.

I'm open to alternative approaches, even using a Windows VM :-)

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2 Answers 2

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You can use the gitian build system. Instructions for building 0.8.x with gitian are available here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/0.8/contrib/gitian-descriptors and here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/0.8/doc/release-process.md. Using gitian should get you exactly the same binaries as those that were released.

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  • Thanks, that's a great opportunity to learn about Gitian. I'll mark your answer as Accepted if that works out.
    – Sjors Provoost
    Jul 5, 2017 at 18:06
  • Unfortunately this won't work out of the box on EC2 (T2): sudo /usr/sbin/kvm-ok INFO: Your CPU does not support KVM extensions KVM acceleration can NOT be used It looks like I would have to use something fancy like Ravello, or am I missing something?
    – Sjors Provoost
    Jul 6, 2017 at 9:22
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    IIRC EC2 itself is a VM, so you can't use KVM in it. However, you should be able to use LXC and there are instructions for that at the bottom of the first link I posted (ignore the virtualbox stuff). You will need to do the make-base-vm commands with the --lxc option too.
    – Andrew Chow ♦
    Jul 6, 2017 at 16:33
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Nick ODell pointed me to the solution:

Edit rpcrawtransaction.cpp and change:

const CScriptID& hash = boost::get<const CScriptID&>(address);

To:

const CScriptID& hash = boost::get<CScriptID>(address);

This was sufficient to get it to compile.

In addition I applied the OpenSSL patch Pieter Wuille pointed out.

You have to do this manually because depends/packages/openssl.mk no longer exists, and the function name and signature has changed. Simply open src/key.cpp and replace everything inside the CKey::Verify function brackets with this new version.

More than 210,000 blocks synced so far, so I'm assuming this worked.

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