Create fai-cd for other architecture?

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Wed, 2023-01-25 at 14:12:56 +0100, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:43:30 +0100, Steffen Grunewald <steffen.grunewald at aei.mpg.de> said:
> 
>     > Cross-platform doesn't work since "grub-mkstandalone" would throw an
>     > "exec format error".
>     > Running "fai-cd" on arm64 doesn't work since it has x86_64 and i386 hardcoded.
> What about running a qemu cross-arch VM on amd64? It would be slow,
> but should be doable? Fixing the hard-coded arch is easy if you tell
> me how this looks for arm64.

I could boot the machine and perform some experiments; a RasPi on the
other hand isn't that slow (but at home, not at the office now).


I already replaced the few amd64 occurrences in fai-cd with arm64,
but got stuck when it proceeded to look for grub-i386.


This is pure EFI so no special tricks would be required. Do we actually need
the whole grub stuff?


> I'm happy for some hints how to support fai-cd on arm64, and maybe
> also cross-arch available. But I'm not sure if grub-mkstandalone can
> do cross-arch.


Perhaps I'm thinking too complicated.
All I want to do is start a kernel and initrd, assign a (fixed, as I don't
trust DHCP for this one) IP address and set the kernel cmdline I'd otherwise
pass to PXE.


A first attempt to use a Debian metinstall image, and edit the boot config,
has failed, I suspect I got the root= parameter wrong. Got to look that up
for the case there had been no proper DHCP handshake before.


- S