having reasonable sucess with Debian/Squeeze LTSP using the efikamx with the armel architecture, i figured i'd try with the armhf port on debian-ports.org.

the trickier part was that qemu-user-static didn't support armhf, so i had to figure out a way to bootstrap it natively. being who i am and what i do, the easiest way seemed to be using the armel LTSP environment...

so i booted the efikamx to a Debian LTSP armel environment, configured a writeable NFS mount on the server and mounted on the efikamx, installed the ltsp-server packages in the chroot, hacked up the ltsp-build-client plugin to use multistrap instead of debootstrap (since with debian-ports i need to pull from multiple repositories)... other than that, the build went fairly smoothly.

i just used a kernel from
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms/efikamx/kernel, and with an initramfs from the armel environment, and it booted more or less successfully.

trying with an initramfs built from the armhf chroot segfaulted with klibc's ipconfig... hrm.

i just now found out those kernels don't really support armhf, so apparently, i'll have to build (or find) and armhf kernel to get any further with this...

apparently that's all wrong. they really don't need an armhf-specific kernel.

might try a different dhcp client and see if i can get that to work...

using udhcpc or hacking it to manually configure the network somewhat worked, although now nfsmount segfaults, which is also in klibc; seems there may be issues klibc in general on armhf...

Just to clarify on the forum: armhf doesn't need anything more than the kernels on PowerDeveloper, however.. actual packaged kernels (in .deb format for the release) need to be marked with the correct architecture and ship with tools like modtool etc. compiled for the right ABI. The same is true for everything required to build debian-installer: the udebs and modules need to be packaged. The problem is the latest debian-installer depends on kernel >2.6.32 for some reason, so we can't put this support in place right now.

As long as you are not installing headers or pre-prepped kernel source everything will be fine. Boot image and modules are not affected by the userspace ABI.

We're working on 2.6.35+ but we have to fix some bugs in .31 first.

_________________
Matt Sealey

after tring udhcpc instead, then nfsmount from klibc segfaulted too.

markos re-built klibc without thumb2 support, and that seems to work fine.

after adding a few more device entries in /dev (multistrap leaves a *very* sparse /dev)... it appears to be working!

I'm glad it worked!

Check the updated wiki page to see if there's anything missing:

http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatTodo