On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 09:55:31AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: > On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 9:33 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The missing piece here is that I want to be able to construct a rootfs > > or an image for an architecture that *isn't* the same as my host > > machine. > > For what purpose? I don't know what Neal is up to, but some uses for a debootstrap-like tool include: * Creating chroots, eg. for confinement of daemons, or testing your code under different distros/versions. * Installing the distribution. Mount a new disk on /tmp/sysroot and run debootstrap /tmp/sysroot, then either unmount the disk and use it to boot a new machine, or run a VM on this disk, or pivot-root into the new distro. * Building containers. There are two subcases, the cross-architecture sub-case (host arch != chroot arch) and the non-root sub-case (run debootstrap as non-root). The non-root sub-case is useful for testing, or any case where you don't want to run stuff as root for security / integrity reasons. The difficult part is setting the right owner/mode on new files. The cross-architecture sub-case is useful where you want to install the distro as above, but for a different architecture. The presence of RPM scripts makes this really hard to do in general. Debootstrap concatenates all the applicable scripts into "init" script which you're supposed to run on first boot in the new environment (where presumably your CPU is able to run them). I don't think this is possible for RPM scripts which are more complex. My opinion is that all RPM scripts should go away, to be replaced by declarative metadata about what users/groups/services/etc are required by the RPM, and it would be up to RPM to execute the right set of commands to bring the system into line with the requirements of the installed packages. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests. http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
