On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 04:30:56PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 09:19:35 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I have to ask how someone would conduct an install to a 32-bit x86 machine
> > running under emulation, assuming no OS on the simulated machine.

> I see four levels of support that we could reasonably have for i386:

> 1. same as in recent Ubuntu: just enough packages (mostly libraries) to
>    configure it as a multiarch foreign architecture on an amd64 system,
>    and run legacy Linux i386 binaries directly or legacy Windows i386
>    binaries via Wine

> 2. same as (1), plus basic utilities (coreutils, etc.) and optionally an
>    init system, to be able to make a pure i386 container or chroot
>    that can run on an externally-provided amd64 kernel

2. is actually closer to what we have in Ubuntu, because builds are still
self-hosted on i386 userspace (with an amd64 kernel).  However, this is
*strictly* limited to the base install + build-dep enclosure for the
packages we want to support; autopkgtests for instance are run in a
cross-environment (and if it can't cross-install, then there's no reason to
care about test results for it because it has no end-user application!)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com                                     vor...@debian.org

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