For various reasons we have a very old development environment at our company. It is based on openSUSE 11.2 32 bit and uses gcc 3.3.6 among other things. At the moment I have the environment installed in a VirtualBox. I start the virtual environment without a window and it uses shared folders to access the code on my host. Then I use ssh to issue build commands into the virtual environment, I have a little bash script doing this so that it almost feels like running make itself. Since the build artifacts end up in my 64 bits host filesystem it is almost as if the virtual environment wasn’t there at all. But there is still a lot of overhead in using a virtual build environment. So I’d like to use a chroot instead.
How do I create a 32 bit openSUSE 11.2 chroot on my 64 bit openSUSE 13.2 system? The 11.2 repos can be accessed from the web even though they are not immediately visible on download.opensuse.org so it should be possible to add the relevant archives to the chroot using zypper.
I have search the web for info about this but I have not been able to find anything that takes me all the way.
Searching for information on chroot environments one gets a lot of hits on debians schroot. Can this be used on an openSUSE system?
> How do I create a 32 bit openSUSE 11.2 chroot on my 64 bit openSUSE 13.2
> system?
<SNIP>
> Searching for information on chroot environments one gets a lot of hits
> on debians schroot. Can this be used on an openSUSE system?
To my knowledge schroot only allows users to invoke commands or interactive shells in different chrooted environments,
rather than accommodating different kernel architectures between chroots. To be honest if there a chroot program that
allows you to boot to 64-kernel and chroot to a 32-bit kernel environment, then I’d very much like to see it because my
bet is that it’s impossible. I see only three options for you:
VM solution (e.g. using kvm).
Separate machines interacting via ssh.
Accept the openSUSE 11.2 environement as obsolete and install all necessary binaries/source/data onto your 64-bit
system.
Although am replying probably long after the OP has lost interest in this question, I’d point the User to UML. With UML, you set up a chroot with a specified kernel of your choice (downloaded, deployed and invoked separated from the HostOS).
In the future, the User should be pointed to the main Technical Help Forums when a question like this is asked which has little to do with his Development objective.
The other main option is QEMU which gives a person almost unlimited choices in kernels and OS, and as is usual all virtualization and/or isolation technologies typically can be deployed on either a “real” file system like a chroot or a backing file (ie virtual disk file).