Building and Development

Building and Development

Using Nix

# Enter development shell
nix develop

# Build the project
nix build

# Run formatting checks
nix build .#checks.x86_64-linux.pre-commit-check

# Run integration tests in VM
nix build .#checks.x86_64-linux.vm-ci-2gpu
nix build .#checks.x86_64-linux.vm-ci-3gpu
nix build .#checks.x86_64-linux.vm-ci-15gpu

# Build the vm and enter
nix run .#nixosConfigurations.x86_64-linux.config.system.build.vm

Manual Compilation

If you don’t use Nix, ensure you have clang, libbpf (devel), libudev (devel), pkg-config and cargo installed (needed for eBPF compilation during the Rust build), plus bpf-linker and a pinned nightly toolchain (see cardwire-ebpf-userspace/build.rs). The GUI build additionally needs the Vulkan, EGL, Wayland and X11 development packages.

Formatting requires nightly rustfmt (the project uses nightly-only formatting options). Install it and run with:

rustup toolchain install nightly --component rustfmt
cargo +nightly fmt --all --check

# Build the project
make

# Install binaries, systemd service, D-Bus config, desktop file, icons and
# metainfo, and enable the systemd unit (requires sudo)
sudo make install

Project Structure

• crates/cardwire-cli: User CLI to interact with the daemon
• crates/cardwire-daemon: System daemon managing state and D-Bus communication
• crates/cardwire-ebpf: BPF program and LSM hooks (never built directly, built by ebpf-userspace)
• crates/cardwire-ebpf-userspace: Loads the BPF program, compiles it at build time
• crates/cardwire-gui: The iced GUI and tray