Adventures in cross-chroot creations

I’ve been playing with qemu-user-static a bit to create a set of porterboxes for my Deb-o-Matic build farm. After reading gregoa’s post on how to create cross-chroot with qemu-debootstrap, I was immediately able to create armel, armhf and powerpc boxes with very little efforts.

I tried to extend the number of porterboxes available by adding mips* and s390x, in order to have all the Linux-based architectures supported in Jessie, but with no luck. Here’s a summary of my attempts.

MIPS*
Chroot creation fails under both mips and mipsel trying to configure libuuid1. The problem is due to the fact libuuid1’s postinst script calls groupadd and useradd. Those two utilities rely on NETLINK sockets, which apparently are not handled by QEMU at the moment. I raised the question upstream to see whether it is possible to solve this problem.

s390x
Chroot creation used to fail with a SIGSEGV. This particular bug has been fixed recently, but it seems it’s not enough to have a working chroot. It fails with some gzip errors, probably because some portions of dpkg-deb are not fully covered by qemu-s390x-static.

Preparing to unpack .../base-files_7.3_s390x.deb ...
Unpacking base-files (7.3) ...
dpkg-deb (subprocess): decompressing archive member: internal gzip read error: '<fd:5>: incorrect data check'
/bin/tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
/bin/tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess tar returned error exit status 2
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-passwd_3.5.33_s390x.deb (--install):
subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2

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