[maemo-developers] Maemo SDK scratchbox breaks with Debian lenny upgrade

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 07 August 2008 22:55:09 Andrew Zabolotny wrote:
> Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> wrote:
> > I am currently looking into whether I can create a UML kernel which
> > runs reliably enough to do building on lenny 32-bit and 64-bit
> > systems.  I am optimistic but am currently having difficulty coming
> > up with a UML kernel which will (i) build, and (ii) run scratchbox
> > for a whole GPE build without hitting a kernel panic or breaking
> > scratchbox.
>
> You also can try qemu-kvm which is what I currently use for
> maemo development on Fedora x86_64. Since the emulated machine is
> 32-bit, I have scratchbox in Ubuntu 8.04 working inside it without
> problems (with vm.vdso_enabled=0 and vm.mmap_min_addr=4096
> in /etc/sysctl.conf). The overall performance drop is about 30%
> compared to host OS (tested on a large build of gcc+glibc+binutils).

I currently use QEMU -- it is the most reliable option but also by far the 
slowest.  Note that my processor does not have the virtualisation extensions 
and so I cannot use KVM -- I get less than 10% performance on real scratchbox 
builds (a GPE build that takes 45 minutes native takes about 6-9 hours in my 
QEMU system).

I use UML on another system and it is a good compromise.  It achieves near 
native speed. My only problem is creating a reliable UML kernel.  I am 
hopeful I will eventually succeed!

But, it would be better if scratchbox and the Maemo SDK would run on debian 
lenny 64-bit kernels (in a chroot).

Graham