Re: [Xen-users] Re: Mixed DomU Architectures

["Dan Hawker" <danhawker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> How about building a chroot'ed 32bit tree within a domU ?
>> At least this is what I do in Debian for installing and running 32bit
>> packages from within 64bit environment.
>
> The problem, as I understand the OP, is that the software being built
> checks (something like) uname -m to see if it's building on a real 32-bit
> x86 machine.  This info comes directly from the kernel rather than through
> the userland, so it reports itself as 64-bit even though it's running in a
>  32-bit userland.
>
>
> A separate-but-related discussion is the (lack of) wisdom of asking the
> kernel what architecture to build for, rather than (eg) gcc, because of
> (a)
> this problem, and (b) the complete lack ability to support
> cross-compilation.  But, if it's good enough for Xen, it's good enough
> for the rest of us.
>
> - Matt
> (who has had to work around this very brain-damage building in 32 bit
> chroots)
>

Thanks Mats, Matt & Yuri for your input.

Luckily this is still yet into true production use, so have a bit of time.
For the moment I am going with Mats' idea of using "setarch i386 bash" as
all of my users ssh (or telnet on very rare occasions) into the machine in
question. All I've ended up doing is create a wrapper and replaced
/bin/bash with this and moved the original bash elsewhere.

Rudimentary testing on my part seems to show that it all works as
expected, however will get one of the developers to try and do some *real
work* on it in the next day or so to ensure it works as expected.

Will investigate some more and report in. I have an identical setup but it
uses non-x86_64 based Xeons. If all else fails I can always just install a
32-bit distro on it instead. Bizarrely we have another x86_64 machine that
my predecessor setup (non-Xen) that runs a x86_64 kernel yet uname reports
an i686 architecture. Will have to have a proper look and see how this was
achieved.

Thanks again

Dan




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