Building from Source

Prerequisites

You need a Rust toolchain matching the version in rust-toolchain.toml — running rustup toolchain install in the project directory will pick it up automatically. You also need clang and libclang for bindgen, which generates Rust bindings from the kernel UAPI headers at build time.

On Fedora/RHEL:

sudo dnf install clang

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install clang libclang-dev

Building with Cargo

cargo build --release

The resulting binaries are target/release/btrfs, target/release/btrfs-mkfs, and target/release/btrfs-tune.

Building with Nix

The project includes a Nix flake that provides a fully reproducible build with all dependencies pinned:

nix build

Outputs land in result/bin/btrfs, result/bin/btrfs-mkfs, result/bin/btrfs-tune, and result/share/man/man1/.

To enter a development shell with all tools available (including nightly rustfmt, cargo-insta, and cargo-llvm-cov):

nix develop

Contributors who want to run the full lint sweep (just check) on a non-Nix machine may also need a host-arch musl cross-compiler — see the “Static checks” section of the testing guide for setup instructions.

Cross-compiling release artifacts

just package cross-compiles statically-linked release artifacts for all supported architectures into target/dist/. For each of x86_64, aarch64, and riscv64gc Linux musl, it produces a zstd-compressed multicall binary, a relocatable tarball, a .deb, and a .rpm.

Requires cargo-zigbuild, cargo-deb, cargo-generate-rpm, zstd, and a Zig 0.11+ binary on PATH. The CI release pipeline uses the same recipe; running just package locally produces byte-identical artifacts to a tagged CI build (modulo timestamps).