Control: reopen -1 Control: retitle -1 "foreign architecture support via binfmt-misc requires systemd"
Quoting Helmut Grohne (2026-10-08 17:45:22)
> On Thu, Oct 08, 2026 at 03:40:29PM +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues
> wrote:
> > do you have some reference text of what is wrong with update-binfmts and
> > why it is no longer useful? I do not see any deprecation notice in the
> > description of the binfmt-support binary package in unstable. The
> > update-binfmts program still exists in unstable and still has the --display
> > option.
>
> There are two competing ways to configure binfmts. Let me call them
> binfmt-support and systemd. (Guess which one existed earlier.)
>
> binfmt-support uses /usr/{share,lib}/binfmts and expects extension-less files
> in a multiline notation.
>
> systemd uses /usr/lib/binfmt.d and expects .conf files containing a single
> colon-separated line.
>
> Please try apt-file search -x '[be]/binfmt[.s]' to get an idea of the
> adoption of either formats.
>
> Ideally, we only have one such format and despite binfmt-support being the
> older one, I think we're having a difficult time converting the systemd
> people. Also qemu does not provide the support files for binfmt-support
> anymore. The only package in sid that does not yet support the systemd way is
> jarwrapper.
>
> So I'd suggest deleting binfmt-support from Debian. Not because it would be
> buggy. Not because it came later (it came first). But because systemd is
> too-big-to-fail and the competing standards evidently pose confusion. I'm
> not going to push for this though.
Great stuff. Seems we need something for platforms which do not use systemd
which is able to consume the /usr/lib/binfmt.d format and registers them as
expected. The format is really simple, maybe i find some time. But this then
has to become another test case for mmdebstrap: foreign architecture emulation
using the kernel's binfmt support on platforms without systemd as init.
I'm re-opening this bug with a new title to not forget about this issue.
Thanks!
cheers, josch
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