Himanshu Pandey

Building and Running MariaDB on Macbook

letting out the Seal in M-series (sea-ries XD)

Building MariaDB

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL which has been in effect to provide users the flexibility to go with an open source version for a DB like MySQL which is owned by Oracle. It is written in C++. To build it on my system(macbook air M2) I followed these steps: We are going to build the server which is where most of things happen for the DBMS

  • Fork the official repo: Github
  • Clone your forked repo: git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/server First time the clone failed because of the following reason:
git clone https://github.com/hp77-creator/my-maria-server.git
Cloning into 'my-maria-server'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 1391033, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (100/100), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (69/69), done.
error: RPC failed; curl 92 HTTP/2 stream 5 was not closed cleanly: CANCEL (err 8)
error: 2491 bytes of body are still expected
fetch-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
fatal: early EOF
fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output

Trying by increasing the buffer size: git config --global http.postBuffer 524288000 The error persists, so I switched to ssh It got cloned.

  • Enter into your cloned directory: cd my-maria-server
  • Create a new build directory and change directory to that: mkdir -p build && cd build
  • We will create a Debug build. To do that, run: cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug During installation, I found out that bison was not installed properly, so I installed it with brew install bison and updated my $PATH to use or you can use
    -DBISON_EXECUTABLE=/opt/homebrew/opt/bison/bin/bison
    option when using cmake
  • You can follow along this link: MariaDB docs

I had read in the book Understanding MySQL Internals that MySQL works best with GCC, so I thought I will try with that but before that I ran it with default compiler provided by Apple(Clang) there were lot of errors and I was trying to run following commands:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build . --parallel 5

During --build it was giving a lot of errors. I looked up the meaning of different errors, those errors were because of strict nullability check by the compiler. To get over those, I added following options:

Note before running the following command, ensure that you have cleared your existing build directory.

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-Wno-nullability-completeness" \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Wno-nullability-completeness"

Also if you like to log the errors, you can do the following during build:

cmake --build . --parallel 5 2>&1 | tee build.log

It failed again, this time it was unable to find the standard <stdint.h> header. I checked up online, If I can find options to provide these headers specifically and I did the following:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++ \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-isystem /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include -isystem /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/include/c++/v1" \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-isystem /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include"

isystem adds system include paths, although ideally it should be added in your CMakeLists.txt file: StackOverflow answer

Using the system compiler didn’t work again, I thought, maybe I should use Homebrew‘s version of clang as from experience I had found it better for cross-platform support.

So, I did the following:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin/clang \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin/clang++ \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Wno-nullability-completeness" \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-Wno-nullability-completeness"

You need to have brew version of clang installed: brew install llvm

I felt maybe clang’s libraries does not have stdint or maybe I am missing something but I thought, let’s try with GCC as I had read it works fine elsewhere. so I installed gcc: brew install gcc

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/gcc/bin/gcc-14 \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/gcc/bin/g++-14

There were some errors on about deined usage and its portability concerns, so I added some more options:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/gcc/bin/gcc-13 \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/opt/gcc/bin/g++-13 \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Wno-error=expansion-to-defined -Wno-error" \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-Wno-error=expansion-to-defined -Wno-error" \
-DWITH_DEBUG=1

I started facing new errors now, something like:

 3%] No configure step for 'libfmt'
In file included from /Users/himanshu.pandey/codes/gh-repos/my-maria-server/libmariadb/include/ma_global.h:152,
from /Users/himanshu.pandey/codes/gh-repos/my-maria-server/libmariadb/libmariadb/get_password.c:19:
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX15.sdk/usr/include/math.h:54:5: error: #error "Unsupported value of __FLT_EVAL_METHOD__."
54 | # error "Unsupported value of __FLT_EVAL_METHOD__."
| ^~~~~

I guess, MariaDB is using some value of __FLT_EVAL_METHOD__ which is not supported by MacOS, I was bit surprised that MacOS libraries were being used, when I had explicitly mentioned to use Homebrew‘s gcc compiler. I tried some approach to use the libraries of gcc but that was also of no use. I also set the values of these functions explicitly so that it is overriden during build stage. There was some progress but then there were some errors on CFI directives like following:

/var/folders/95/n9tm7h4s46sdk134wgfzj8s40000gp/T//ccn7M7ep.s:36:2: error: this directive must appear between .cfi_startproc and .cfi_endproc directives
.cfi_escape 0x07, 30
^
make[2]: *** [libmariadb/libmariadb/CMakeFiles/mariadb_obj.dir/ma_context.c.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [libmariadb/libmariadb/CMakeFiles/mariadb_obj.dir/all] Error 2

I asked Chatgpt and it told this happens when we do relocation on ARM systems, I figured it could be the mismatch between the machine configuration,

CFI directives are used by debuggers and unwinders to walk the call stack I presented my script to it to suggest modifications, it gave the following with Default clang version:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++ \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Wno-error -D__FLT_EVAL_METHOD__=0" \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-Wno-error -D__FLT_EVAL_METHOD__=0" \
-DWITH_DEBUG=1 \
-DWITHOUT_TOKUDB=1 \
-DWITH_UNIT_TESTS=OFF \
-DWITH_SSL=system \
-DWITH_ZLIB=system \
-DCONC_WITH_EXTERNAL_ZLIB=ON \
-DWITHOUT_MROONGA=1 \
-DWITHOUT_ROCKSDB=1

This script gave a lot of errors on OPENSSL casting. I added the flags to disable these warnings and disabled a lot of plugins that are by default enabled while building the server.

Update: 3rd June, 2025 – Add a new flag CMakeList version flag because of wsrep-lib CMake Version

At the end, I created a script with the commands that I had to type again and again and it came out to look like following:

#!/bin/sh

# Set paths
MACOS_SDK=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX15.sdk

# Common flags for both C and C++ (all in one line)
COMMON_FLAGS="-w \
-g \
-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables \
-ffunction-sections \
-fdata-sections \
-fno-common \
-mmacosx-version-min=14.0 \
-arch arm64"

# Clean and create build directory
rm -rf cmake-build-debug
mkdir -p cmake-build-debug && cd cmake-build-debug

# Run cmake with Clang
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}" \
-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}" \
-DCMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT="${MACOS_SDK}" \
-DCMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=14.0 \
-DWITH_DEBUG=1 \
-DWITHOUT_TOKUDB=1 \
-DWITH_UNIT_TESTS=OFF \
-DWITH_SSL=system \
-DWITH_ZLIB=system \
-DCONC_WITH_EXTERNAL_ZLIB=ON \
-DWITHOUT_MROONGA=1 \
-DWITHOUT_ROCKSDB=1 \
-DPLUGIN_TOKUDB=NO \
-DPLUGIN_ROCKSDB=NO \
-DPLUGIN_MROONGA=NO \
-DCONNECT_WITH_MONGO=OFF \
-DCONNECT_WITH_BSON=OFF \
-DMYSQL_MAINTAINER_MODE=OFF \  
-DCMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5 \
-G Ninja

# Build using ninja with parallel jobs and logging
cmake --build . --parallel 5 2>&1 | tee build.log

Running MariaDB locally

You can directly follow official docs;

I will just summarize what I did:

  • Create a directory to store your data, I named it mariaddb_data and stored it in my home directory
  • Create a configuration file like following
[client-server]
socket = path/to/mariadb.sock

[mariadb]
datadir = path/to/mariadb_data
  • Change directory to your build directory and run the following script
/scripts/mariadb-install-db \
--user=$(whoami) \
--datadir=path/to/mariadb_data \
--srcdir=path/to/server \
--defaults-file=path/to/mariadb.conf
  • Open a new terminal session, cd to your build directory and start the server
./sql/mariadbd --defaults-file=path/to/mariadb.conf
  • Start the client in new session
./client/mariadb --defaults-file=path/to/mariadb.conf

You can then run the following commands and verify your build:

SHOW DATABASES;
CREATE DATABASE testdb;
USE testdb;
CREATE TABLE test (id INT, name VARCHAR(50));
INSERT INTO test VALUES (1, 'Test User');
SELECT * FROM test;

Building and running it took most of my day, will write about internals in another blog post

References

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