[Aboriginal] Can Aboriginal Linux be used to create a Debian rootfs

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Jan 3 14:00:00 PST 2016


Sorry this fell through the cracks, busy few months. (And Dreamhost
decided to eat the mailing list web archive _again_. Kinda annoyed at
them. There's still _11 months_ missing. We may be light traffic here
with most of the action in toybox at the moment, but not _that_ light.)

On 11/07/2015 05:01 AM, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote:
> On 30/10/2015 4:08 PM, Rob Landley wrote:
>> On 10/29/2015 08:07 PM, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote:
>>> Hi.  Just stumbled across Aboriginal Linux and it looks like an great
>>> project :)
>>>
>>> I am trying to create a Debian rootfs for an embedded system that uses
>>> Dual ARM A9 cores (Xilinx Zynq SoC).
>>>
>>> I'm currently trying to use multistrap (from the Emdebian project) and
>>> am now trying moved to brickstrap (a fork of polystrap which is a fork
>>> of multistrap).  Brickstrap does everything in userspace via proot and
>>> uses QEMU for the final configuration phase.
>>>
>>> I was wondering if it is possible to use Aboriginal Linux to do some or
>>> all of this?  i.e. create a Debian rootfs from debian binary packages.
>>> Would it be simpler?
>> In theory, yes. In practice, it's a big todo item as explained here:
>>
>>   http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#hairball
>>
>> For Debian I've been vaguely looking at:
>>
>>   https://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap
> 
> I've had success with Brickstrap (well in creating a rootfs, but not
> tested yet).  Brickstrap now uses Linux user namespaces instead of proot.
> 
>     https://blog.mister-muffin.de/category/linux/

Blog categories isn't quite a proper replacement for a project page. (I
have this problem with ellcc.org as well...)

> The project/tool is called 'user-unshare', but it looks like it is going
> to be call uroot (as it is intended as a replacement for proot).
> 
>     https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/user-unshare

Which sounds like a replacement for fakeroot?

I boot virtual systems under qemu so I don't need to do that, I can give
the build environment root in its own restricted space. (Although
"container" vs "vm" is a thing that I never did write up my SCALE talk
on. I see the appeal of doing it in containers, I just can't do an arm
container on an x86 system without the qemu application emulation can of
worms...)

> Brickstrap uses user-unshare, multistrap and libguestfs to create my
> rootfs from .deb packages via apt, and configure them, creates a disk
> image, all without requiring superuser rights :)

It sounds very interesting. However, I'd rather have something with
fewer dependencies operating in a container or vm where it thinks it has
superuser rights.

Aboriginal creates a system image without superuser rights, and then
uses qemu to boot that system image in a VM where it has full (emulated)
hardware access. That's the replacing cross compiling with native
compiling stuff from the 2008 presentation.

Anyway, I am interested in following up on this, just... a bit
overstretched the past few years. :)

> Cheers, Brendan.

Rob

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