[LinuxBIOS] Prestine Qemu on Debian following linuxbios tutorial leads to login prompt ... but not directly so
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Dear LinuxBIOS developers,
Please add a line like the following to your FILO readme and on the Wiki page http://linuxbios.org/FILO. Many thanks go to Robert Millan for http://linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2007-November/026789.html and to Google.
+ On AMD64 for Debian install the gcc-multilib package.
Eventually I got to the point that the tutorial suggests to reach
Booting 'hda:/boot/vmlinuz' Mounted ext2fs Found Linux version 2.6.23-1-amd64 (unknown@Debian) #1 SMP Fri Nov 30 12:19:15 UTC 2007 bzImage. Loading kernel... ok Jumping to entry point...
but no further than that. And, jumping to the rescue of FILO a bit, qemu -hda disk.img -nographic does not even say "hello".
In this thread from Sept2006/April2007 http://linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-September/015568.html it was suggested to use a different FILO than the version 0.5 that I tapped into, however, I could not find any indication for any earlier release I could try. Please consider to update the tutorial respectively.
After some food uptake I then downloaded http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r1-i386-neti..., a CD image to net-install Debian. This is something bootable. Running qemu -cdrom debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso -hda disk.img -boot d does the expected and shows the Debian boot splash. This should be repeatable with FILO and LinuxBIOS, so I thought, good I am not overly knowledgable here, but qemu -L . -cdrom debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso - -hda disk.img -boot d (just the -L being added with . harboring the bios.bin and the vgabios-cirrus.bin) instead the system booted right into my debootstrapped system in disk.img. Hillarious, isn't it, after spending the full afternoon at it? The qemu option -boot d officially indicates to boot from cdrom and thus represents not much of a magic.
With a second look at the iso it became fairly obvious why this was not bootet:
$ ls /mnt/loopmountedNetInstIsoCD autorun.bat dists/ isolinux/ README.html tools/ autorun.inf doc/ md5sum.txt README.mirrors.html debian/ install/ pics/ README.mirrors.txt .disk/ install.386/ pool/ README.txt
So, apparently, it is just some stupid (?) initial hurdle that the CD's iso gave before the kernel with its the initrd on /dev/hda could be run.
As another sidenote, the tutorial should not suggest to first copy the kernels and then run deboostrap. Instead, one should chroot into /mnt/rootfs and apt-get install linux-image-686, especially if one's own kernels are AMD64. And if using debootstrap then the /etc/fstab needs to be set, still. Setting the inittab default userlevel to 2 instead of the suggested 1 provides me with a login prompt. Otherwise the daemons are not started properly and I am kicked out.
Is there someone on this list who could help me with preparing a fully bootable image file that is compatible with FILO? These guys here are cheating http://franciscoalecrim.blogspot.com/2007/08/howto-debian-qemu-running-debia... by specifying the kernel outside the chroot. I am doing something wrong when I now go and install lilo or so, right?
Cheers,
Steffen
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Steffen Moeller