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title V-Agent on Void Linux
description Installing and building V-Agent on Void Linux, and the quirks specific to it.

V-Agent on Void Linux

Void is supported on the glibc variant only. Everything below assumes it.

glibc or musl

Void ships two libc variants, chosen by which ISO was installed. The musl images are named -musl- in the filename; the default is glibc.

ldd --version | head -1

The prebuilt binary is linked against glibc and cannot run on a musl install under any circumstance, because there is no system glibc to fall back on. Building the GUI from source against x86_64-unknown-linux-musl has never been attempted; the only musl target the repository builds today is the headless remote_server (see Remote Development).

Requirements: glibc 2.35 or newer, and a working Vulkan driver.

The 2.35 floor is MEASURED from the shipped binary, not copied from upstream Zed's stated 2.31. objdump -T on the release binary shows non-weak __libc_start_main@GLIBC_2.34 and hypot@GLIBC_2.35, so it cannot start below 2.35. It tracks whatever runner the release workflow builds on, currently ubuntu-22.04. Void is a rolling distribution and is well past this, but the number matters for the dependency the package declares.

Installing a Vulkan driver

This is the part that catches people out. Void has no vulkan-driver virtual package, and installing mesa does not install a Vulkan ICD. The driver is a separate package per GPU, and no V-Agent package can depend on it:

GPU Package
AMD mesa-vulkan-radeon
Intel mesa-vulkan-intel
NVIDIA (open source) mesa-vulkan-nouveau
NVIDIA (proprietary) nvidia (from the nonfree repository)
No GPU / software rendering mesa-vulkan-lavapipe

vulkan-loader is a dependency of the package and is pulled in for you.

To confirm the driver works before installing anything else:

sudo xbps-install -S Vulkan-Tools
vulkaninfo --summary

A line naming your GPU under Devices: means Vulkan is working. If it lists no device, the ICD is missing: check /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/ for a .json matching your GPU.

CUDA being broken is not evidence that Vulkan is broken. They are separate driver entry points, and V-Agent uses only Vulkan.

Installing V-Agent

From the release .xbps

Download v-agent-<version>_1.x86_64.xbps from the releases page. xbps has no equivalent of pacman -U or dnf install ./file.rpm: it installs from repositories, so the directory holding the file has to be indexed first.

cd ~/Downloads
xbps-rindex -a v-agent-*.x86_64.xbps
sudo xbps-install -R ~/Downloads v-agent

The release asset name carries the version, so releases/latest/download/ does not resolve to it; take the filename from the releases page.

Do not rename the file. xbps looks it up as <pkgver>.<arch>.xbps from the index it just wrote, and a renamed file fails with failed to checksum: No such file or directory.

Building the package yourself

packaging/void/template is an xbps-src template that wraps the same prebuilt binary. Unlike the release .xbps, xbps-src derives the library dependencies from the binary's NEEDED entries rather than a hand-written list:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages
cd void-packages && ./xbps-src binary-bootstrap
cp -r /path/to/V-Agent/packaging/void srcpkgs/v-agent-bin
./xbps-src pkg v-agent-bin
sudo xbps-install --repository hostdir/binpkgs v-agent-bin

This does not require root until the final install step.

Any-distro fallbacks

The .AppImage and the portable .tar.gz work on Void as on any other distribution, subject to the same glibc and Vulkan requirements.

Building from source

script/linux detects xbps-install and installs the Void build dependencies:

script/linux
cargo run

See Building V-Agent for Linux for the rest, which is not Void-specific.

Two Void-specific things that script does not do for you:

  • It installs no Vulkan ICD, only vulkan-loader. Install the driver package for your GPU separately, as above, or the build will succeed and the editor will fail to start.
  • It does not install a Rust toolchain or protoc. Use rustup (it reads rust-toolchain.toml and picks the pinned version automatically) and install protobuf from xbps, or drop a protoc release binary in ~/.local/bin.

The Void list in script/linux was missing libX11-devel, libglvnd-devel and vulkan-loader-devel until it was corrected. Without libX11-devel the build panics in the x11 crate's build script with "The system library x11 required by crate x11 was not found", because zed-scap pulls x11 in through gpui. If you are building against an older checkout, install those three by hand.

Package size

The release binary ships unstripped so that V-Agent's hang detector can symbolize its own backtraces. Installed size is roughly 2.3 GB against a 405 MB download. This is inherited from the debug = "limited" setting in the workspace release profile, not from the packaging.

Upstreaming

Getting v-agent into the official void-packages repository requires review by a Void maintainer, the same adoption problem that applies to Arch's official repositories and to Debian. The realistic path if that stalls is a self-hosted xbps repository, which users add once and then install from normally.