I've been working on the same thing, in order to end up with a reasonably stable setup rather than constant chasing of main-line. What I find works quite well is the following:
- Get F13 installed on your ARM dev box.
- Enable alignment fix-up for the sake of your sanity: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673691 For the benefit of community and developer education, enable fix-up with logging of warnings and for everything that logs a warning get a core dump afterwards and file a bug report upstream. x86 induced brain damage to do with assuming alignment fix-ups is quite rampant, even in critically important things like e2fsprogs.
- Get VServer working on it Google it. This may help you get started with package versions that work http://archives.linux-vserver.org/201103/0081.html
- Build a F13 guest using yum. Use this for building packages. Helps keep things clean and reproducible. You'll have to roll your own VServer yum config setup and patch yum, see http://archives.linux-vserver.org/201103/0082.html
- In the guest, fire off the package build for any/all SRPMs from RH/CS/SL 6 SRPMs you need. Some things will build, some won't. Some of the things that build won't necessarily work. See the ARM specific patches for Fedora packages to help you get some of these working. You may have to modify some of the ARM specific patches for the packages since RHEL6 is close to but not identical to F12/F13, and some of the patches may not apply cleanly accross even non-identical package versions. You might also want to include special modified versions of some packages (e.g. OpenSSL with crypto offload engine support if your ARM boxen support such a thing (http://www.altechnative.net/?p=174).
Once you have enough packages for the rootfs, put them in a yum repository and use the VServer yum guest install process to build a guest chroot. Internalize the RPM package management in the new guest, and tar up the directory. There's your rootfs tar ball. :)
The main downside of this approach that I have found is that it takes forever to build on your own unless you have your own build farm. Unfortunately, I only have two ARM machines available to me at the moment (SheevaPlug and an AC100 - I gave my Efika MX Smartbook to a family member), and sadly that means that building just the things you need for a rootfs take a rather long time. Using a hack like this helps to get things bootstrapped quickly: http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-arm/msg01262.html But I've not gotten around to doing that yet.
Gordan
On Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:08:26 -0400, Donald Gullett webwillow@thewebwillow.com wrote:
Compiling the packages is not a problem as i am compiling a load of f14 and f15 packages now.
Chris Tyler chris@tylers.info wrote:
On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 01:32 -0400, Donald Gullett wrote:
Can anyone point me in the direction of information on building a centos rootfs?
You'd have to compile a substantial portion of the CentOS package collection for ARM, then create a rootfs based on that.
How was the fedora rootfs setup derived? Was it a posted redhat document or procedure or an existing fedora installed system?
It's a hackish script that runs against the ARM package repo. A kickstart-based solution will get written in due course, I'm sure.
-Chris
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