Re: Need maintainer guide for debugging on i386

[Jochen Sprickerhof]

Hi,

* Theodore Ts'o <ty...@mit.edu> [2025-05-01 09:24]:

On Thu, May 01, 2025 at 12:28:10PM +0000, Mathias Gibbens wrote:

On Mon, 2025-04-21 at 13:12 +0200, Bastien Roucaries wrote:
> Now we could not install on i386, we need a wiki page for how to
> debug quickly on i386

  It's easy to setup an i386 container with Incus, which is how I've
been running 32bit builds/debugging for the past few years. Assuming
you've already got Incus configured to your liking:

$ sudo apt install distrobuilder squashfs-tools-ng

$ sudo distrobuilder build-incus /usr/share/distrobuilder-images/debian.yaml 
./trixie.i386/ -o image.release=trixie -o image.architecture=i386
$ incus image import --alias trixie.i386 ./trixie.i386/incus.tar.xz 
./trixie.i386/rootfs.squashfs

$ incus launch trixie.i386

I just set up a schroot[1].  I have a handy-dandy schroot setup script
which makes it super easy[2] to create an amd64, i386, and arm64
(using qemu) build chroots.  This was originally created to let random
graduate students or kernel newbies set up a kernel file system test
appliance[3][4], but these days I very often use this for general
cross-architecture debian development.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot
[2] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/setup-buildchroot
[3] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
[4] 
https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/Documentation/building-xfstests.md

I will also use sbuild with git-buildpackage when creating
hermetically built packages for uploading, but that's a lot more
complicated to set up.

For trixie and bookworm-backports this is will drop you in a shell:

mmdebstrap --variant=apt --arch=i386 --chrooted-customize-hook=bash unstable 
/dev/null



sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare --dist=unstable --arch=i386 
--starting-build-commands=%s hello

Cheers Jochen

Or if you want to debug a package build anyhow (replace hello by your package):

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