On Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 12:53:49AM -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>
> Looking at https://www.devuan.org/os/install it seems everything is
> x86_64 only. Is there any documentation anywhere regarding a cross
> debootstrap to something like RISC-V or even aarch64?

I'm not aware of specific documentation, but I've done it a couple of
times so perhaps I can drop some notes here.

In recent times, I've done this using binfmt-support and qemu-user
plus manual setup so that my amd64 host is able to transparently
execute the target architecture binaries without further ado. Then the
debootstrap command merely includes the --arch=xxx argument for
guiding it to the packages for that architecture.

Thus,
   1) install binfmt-support and qemu-user
   2) modprobe binfmt_misc
   3) cat /usr/share/qemu/binfmt.d/qemu-riscv64.conf > \
          /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
   ... you can use "dpkg -L qemu-user" to see which the target
   architecture options are. ** Don't install emulation for the host
   architecture though!! **
   4) debootstrap --variant=minbase --arch=riscv64 excalibur FS \
         http://deb.devuan.org/merged
   5) chroot FS
   .... and then proceed as if the host would be of the target
   architecture.
   * If you want to prepare for a qemu disk, you'll need to make sure
   the filesystem, FS, is on that disk, and you must of course install
   kernel etc. Further, the boot priming needs special attention.

Ralph.

>
>
> --
> --
> Dennis Clarke
> RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
> UNIX and Linux spoken
>
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