14 Jul 2011 (Thu)

08:28:40 # Life Tried running qemu-user-static. It seems to work at least for armel, apart from some weird cdebootstrap brokenness on stable. It's much easier to control than a QEMU system image and having to maintain a linux kernel. I saw a bunch of qemu: Unsupported syscall: 341 (arm_sync_file_range?) and Unsupported ioctl: cmd=0xc020660b but that didn't seem to affect a lot. I see a somewhat outdated page in Debian Wiki about this set up. I think most problems have been solved and things are much simpler now with current Debian stable.

$ sudo cdebootstrap --arch armel --foreign sid . http://localhost:9999/debian
$ sudo dpkg -x ./var/cache/bootstrap/libacl1_2.2.51-2_armel.deb .  # something is broken, fix it.
$ sudo dpkg -x ./var/cache/bootstrap/libattr1_2.4.46-2_armel.deb .  # something is broken, fix it.
$ sudo cp -a /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static usr/bin/	
$ LC_ALL=C sudo chroot . ./usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /bin/bash
# /sbin/cdebootstrap-foreign # this will run second-stage install.
# # now you have a working shell!