2009-07-29

it is possible to install alien architectures on Debian systems, by using qemu
userspace emulation. so far, this has been tested with qemu 0.11.0-rc0,
building an armel LTSP chroot on an i386 server. other architectures did not
work at the time of this writing.  it requires using a statically built qemu
userspace binary for the appropriate architecture, which requires building qemu
using the --static flag to the configure script. it also requires setting up
binfmt_misc to set the emulator to use for binaries of that architecture. 


to register arm binaries for binfmt-misc:

  apt-get install binfmt-support

  cat << EOF > /usr/share/binfmts/arm
package qemu
interpreter /usr/bin/qemu-arm
flags: OC
offset 0
magic \x7fELF\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x28\x00
mask \xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff
EOF

  update-binfmts --import arm


getting a static qemu binary:

hopefully this will be available in debian itself soon, until then...  i built
qemu by grabbing a qemu source tarball from http://www.qemu.org/download.html,
i had to dig around to find the 0.11.0-rc0 pre-release. then grab the debian
dir from sid's qemu package. edit debian/rules to pass the --static option to
configure. it needs to have either a qemu-armel-static or qemu-armel binary
available in /usr/bin.


once it's all set up, it's as simple as specifying the architecture, and
possibly the kernel package:

  ltsp-build-client --arch armel --kernel-packages linux-image-2.6-kirkwood

some architecture-specific configuration of the kernel may be required.