[arch-general] How to cross-pacstrap for other architecture

[Erich Eckner]

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On Sat, 24 Apr 2021, Stefan Göbel via arch-general wrote:

> On 24.04.21 17:41, Uwe Sauter via arch-general wrote:
>> I've tried running 'pacstrap -C pacman.aarch64.conf /mnt base' where
>> pacman.aarch64.conf is extracted from the Arch Linux Arm installation
>> archive but after the packages are extracted, pacman tries to run
>> something inside the installation environment which fails due to the
>> mismatch in architectures.
>
> You can setup QEMU to allow running foreign arch stuff, see [1].
>
> I'm not sure if that will allow you to pacstrap an AArch64 root
> directly from the host. If it fails, you can grab the Arch Linux ARM
> AArch64 image and run pacstrap from within the extracted root dir,
> e.g. `arch-chroot </path/to/aarch64/root> pacstrap …`.
>
> [1] <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Chrooting_into_arm/arm64_environment_from_x86_64>
>

This method is good for recovering an unbootable raspi (that's, what I do 
in this case). IIRC, pacstrap from the host even works, too (mkinitcpio 
obviously fails in autodetect hooks and such stuff).

However, I did not yet get all the files necessary for boot into the right 
place (bootloader, device tree, etc.) to actually pacstrap onto a 
previously empty microsd card.

In case, that you are successful pacstrapping into an empty partition and 
makeing it bootable on a raspi, I would be really interested in the 
additional steps necessary. However, I think, this is rather a topic for 
the arch-ports mailing list, because it is too detached from x86_64 arch 
linux :-)

regards,
Erich

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