WG: Speedup when using qemu to cross-build packages.
Hi Josh, hi Helmut,
again, many thanks for all the information. I feel quite a bit overwhelmed right now, but it really looks like very valuable pointers I would not have found by chance.
So far, I'm really quite a bit under shock w.r.t. how complicated it seems to be to get the remaining work done, but I certainly do understand why cross-building is essential for porting.
W.r.t the packages I've tried to build: I did the exercise today for Debian Bullseye, so maybe I would have had more success for Bookworm or even Sid?! Anyhow, this is what I did:
1) Get the list of basic source packages:
$ apt-cache show $(sudo debootstrap --arch=armhf --print-debs bullseye /tmp/be) | awk '$1~/^Package:/{n=$2} $1~/^Source:/{n=$2} /^$/{print n}' | sort -u
2) For each of these packages, I start a fresh docker container "FROM scratch", that I fill with the rootfs that I got from:
$ debootstrap --arch=amd64 --include="gpg.dirmngr.gpg-agent.ca-certificates.crossbuild-essential-armhf" --variant=buildd bullseye /tmp/amd64
Furthermore, I add the additional architecture ...
$ dpkg --add-architecture armhf
... and the source packages:
echo "deb-src deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main" >>/etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update
3) Finally, I run the following commands for each package, always starting with a fresh container instance as described so far:
$ apt-get build-dep --yes --host-architecture=armhf $package
$ apt-get source $package
$ cd ${package}* && DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck dpkg-buildpackage --no-check-builddeps --jobs=$(nproc) -us -uc --jobs-try=$(nproc) --build=binary --host-arch=armhf
When doing this, the following 54 packages successfully build: libtirpc shadow init-system-helpers p11-kit cdebconf libcap2 adduser nano apt debian-archive-keyring iptables libcap-ng sysvinit logrotate kmod cron tasksel libtext-charwidth-perl util-linux tar e2fsprogs libffi ncurses nettle elfutils less audit libseccomp tzdata acl libbsd pam libnftnl rsyslog cryptsetup findutils libedit liblocale-gettext-perl iputils base-passwd isc-dhcp sed sensible-utils slang2 grep netbase libnsl newt libbpf base-files coreutils libtext-iconv-perl readline iproute2
These 21 packages cannot install their build dependencies: apparmor bash bind9-libs cpio db5.3 debconf glibc gnupg2 gzip jansson krb5 libgcrypt20 libgpg-error libidn2 liblognorm libtext-wrapi18n-perl lsb lvm2 nftables systemd vim
And these 38 fail to build: mawk libsemanage gmp libmnl popt libxcrypt libsepol perl dpkg libzstd keyutils libmd gnutls28 debianutils openssl libfastjson pcre2 attr xz-utils argon2 xxhash hostname libtasn1-6 gcc-10 diffutils procps json-c libselinux libestr gcc-9 zlib bzip2 dash dmidecode lz4 pcre3 libunistring ifupdown
> > To me, the major problem is that cross-building seems to be not even a
> > second-class citizen to package maintainers: When cross-building only the
> > most basic packages, i.e. those being reported by "debootstrap
> > --print-debs", less than a third build sucessfully, the rest fail for various
> > reasons, many of them (e.g. bash, glibc, apparmor, ...) even fail already to
> > install their required build dependencies!
> Maybe you are not cross-building them correctly? How are you cross-building
> Debian packages? Above you say that less than a third cross-build successfully.
> I cannot confirm this observation. Using crossqa.d.n, the situation for the
> packages shown by debootstrap --print-debs is not too bad. The only source
> packages in that selection that never succeeded to cross-build in the last runs
> on crossqa.d.n are db5.3, gcc-12, libselinux, libsemanage and vim. So only five
> source packages out of your selection of 109.
So I exaggerated a bit: It's less than half (not less than a third) of the packages that successfully build (for bullseye). Besides building for bullseye instead of sid, is there any other obvious reason for the discrepancy?
Many thanks for your precious time,
Chris
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