[GSoC Report][Community Bonding + Week 1] Architecture Cross-Grading Support in Debian

[Kevin Wu <kevin@kevinniuwu.com>]

Hi all!

During the community bonding period, I...
1. continued experimenting with crossgrading arm64->amd64
    - got qemu-user-static working in the initramfs
2. joined the #debian, #debian-devel, and #multiarch channels on IRC

As of now, work has been going according to the proposed timeline.
This week's work has consisted mainly of investigating the
arm64->amd64 crossgrade. The work done here will be useful for all
crossgrades to architectures not supported on the same CPU.

Week 1 progress:
1. Wrote a script to crossgrade packages with initramfs hook scripts
2. Booted the system successfully in amd64! (albeit in a half-broken state)
3. Modified mkinitramfs to notify the user of non-target architecture
binaries being copied

Roadblocks:
1. Figuring out how/when to crossgrade important packages (systemd,
apt, dpkg, etc.)
    - For now, the plan is to crossgrade each package before reboot to
the target architecture using dpkg and qemu-user-static
2. Obtaining an old Debian image for testing (i.e. one with lots of
packages and artifacts of use)
3. Obtaining a physical system to test foreign architecture crossgrades

It's been a wonderful experience so far. We'll see how the next week goes :-)

Regards,
Kevin Wu