[LinuxBIOS] Prestine Qemu on Debian following linuxbios tutorial leads to login prompt ... but not directly so

[Steffen Moeller]

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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 at 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-netinst.iso,
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-debian-inside.html
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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