missing /dev/console in debootstrap --foreign, a bug or not ?

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,

we are currently trying to develop a tool to cross build an ARM rootfs.
This tool is essentially a wrapper around debootstrap and
qemu-system-arm. It first runs debootstrap --foreign on a qemu image it
creates, then spawns a qemu instance in which it
runs /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage (it does a good bunch of
other stuff, but thats not relevant for this mail).

What we found during work on this script is that the first stage of
debootstrap --foreign does not create a /dev/console node, so qemu
panics during boot if you ise it with a bare kernel image (it might be
different if you use an initramfs that spawns udev though, which we
currently not do for bootstrapping)

currently the script simply calls mknod to add the device file to the
image, but we were discussing the issue in the mobile team and came to
the conclusion that running debootstrap --foreign might indeed often be
used like that. to me it is not clear if debootstrap --foreign shouldnt
create /dev/console in any case. normal debootstrapping of non foreign
chroots wouldnt be affected so the default behavior wouldnt change if
you for example do a debootstrap --arch=i386 on an amd64 host or
--arch=lpia on a i386 one ... it would only affect cases where yu
actually can not chroot and execute the binaries inside the chroot.

some input from people with deeper insight in the debootstrap code would
be very helpful here.

ciao
	oli


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20090120/25516626/attachment.pgp