Feature request summary

This issue tracks adding additional checks to the Unikraft build system for all required software (and minimum/maximum versions of those software) to compile a Unikarft unikernel.

The check should be performed within the build system itself and serves as a failsafe for anyone who has not followed all set up instructions or have a misconfigured host environment which would result in an ambigious error.

Already this is done to check the minimum required version of Make before continuing with the build:

For now, the kraft container has a list of the necessary software which is packaged together for reproducible environments, however, not everyone uses this container image nor wish to use the standard environment (Debian).

The following tools and additional libraries are necessary to build a Unikraft unikernel. I am actually not sure which minimum (or maximum) necessary versions are required so this will need to be checked too:

Thoughts on approaches

• As part of the internal Make system (using Make-fu semver checking);
• Probably it is better as a standalone script (similar but definitely not ./configure) where these checks can be performed independently so as to speed up the build.

cc @maintainers-core, @unikraft/maintainers-build feel free to edit/update this issue with additional context, information, approaches.