Re: Fwd: Debian on Linux-SH4

> On 1/11/22 12:23, Robert Święcki wrote:
> > Recently I tried to create a working modern disk image for Linux-SH4.
> > There were many problems, but I finally managed to pull it off.
> >
> > If anyone needs a working Debian (unstable/experimental) + kernel
> > 5.15.0 - here're the images/kernels/scripts
>
> You could also create a Debian unstable environment for the sh4 architecture
> using debootstrap:
>
> suse-laptop:/tmp # debootstrap --no-check-gpg --arch=sh4 --foreign unstable debian-sh4-root http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports
> I: Retrieving InRelease
> I: Retrieving Packages
> I: Validating Packages
> I: Resolving dependencies of required packages...
> (...)
> I: Extracting login...
> I: Extracting logsave...
> I: Extracting mawk...
> I: Extracting mount...
> I: Extracting ncurses-bin...
> I: Extracting passwd...
> I: Extracting perl-base...
> I: Extracting sed...
> I: Extracting sysvinit-utils...
> I: Extracting tar...
> I: Extracting util-linux...
> I: Extracting zlib1g...
> suse-laptop:/tmp #
>
> Then run "./debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage" on the target system.
>
> If your qemu-user is properly set up to use binfmt (which is currently not the case on my
> system), you can omit the "--foreign" option and get a ready-to-boot chroot for Debian sh4.

Thanks, I guess I did it the hard way then (through the debian-installer) :)

BTW: some problems I noticed during installation:

- debian-installer for sh4 (probably one of the most recent ones) has
tools compiled with glibc-2.33 but the version of glibc inside (initrd
image) is glibc-2.32, so some tools like mount and part*something
refuse to run with sth like "missing symbol GLIBC_2.33"
- debian-installer comes with kernel version 5.13 or so, and the
pool-sh4 has only 5.15.*-di kernels - I used custom kernel with custom
kernel version (so it matches the -di kernel version)
- older debian-installers for sh4 won't run on r2d with 64MB RAM due
to OOOms. I added some ninja swap images to bypass that. I think newer
installers have low-RAM mode, and it works better.

PS: Many years ago I was solving a CTF (Capture The Flag) challenge -
https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2014/12/seccon-2014-japanese-super-micro.html
- which was using SH4 for Linux compiled in big-endian mode. I guess
someone went through troubles to compile Linux kernel in big-endian,
and then compiled some userland to big-endian too. Dunno.