FAI on Sparc with nfsroot for multiple architectures?

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

yes, you can tell debootstrap which arch to use, but not
make-fai-nfsroot. At least the latter (make-fai-nfsroot) calls some
binaries inside the created nfsroot which must be the same arch as the
system it's running on. (And I think the same must be true for
debootsrap and the post/pre-inst-skripts.)

But you can manually install debian and fai on i386, edit fai.conf and
call fai-setup to  create the nfsroot and transfer that to your sparc
machine. There's even /usr/share/fai/utils/create-nfsroot-tar for this
purpose.

I've done this for i386->powerpc and vice versa. It helps to have FAI
working on the target arch, though ;) 


regards,
	Holger

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 14:05, Juraj Holtak wrote:
> u can tell debootstrap which arch it should use. so maybe u just need to
> hack the nfs-creation process to use i386 and not the native arch ->
> sparc
> 
> juraj
> 
> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 13:57, Henning Glawe wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 01:36:14PM +0200, jimmy at g-tec.co.at wrote:
> > > I've just started using FAI and need to know if there's a way to handle
> > > other architectures, too.
> > > I have a Debian sparc machine that should be the install server. All
> > > other machines are i386. I realized that it doesn't work to create a
> > > nfsroot for i386 on the sparc machine but I still think this "problem"
> > > should be solvable, right? Would it work to provide Debian packages for
> > > different nfsroots? 
> > > Any comments appreciated.
> > the problem: FAI nfsroot creation involves calling "debootstrap", which
> > in term involves exectuting target-architecture binary code.
> > Some thoughts:
> > 
> > - create the nfsroot on a i386 machine (either to a no_root_squish nfs
> >   export from your sparc, or copy the result to the server)
> >   
> > - use something ugly like bochs...
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