On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Rick "Zero_Chaos" Farina <zeroch...@gentoo.org> wrote: > I can honestly say most of the time when setup my arm systems I'm > unpacking the arm stage3 on an amd64 and then booting the arm device > with the base stage3 and fixing things from there. I suppose it is > possible to use qemu to install things, as long as I don't mind > pretending it's 1999 due to the slow emulation speeds... Yeah, I really > don't see an improvement here. It works fine for "I'm an amd64 user and > that's all I'll ever use" but when you start talking about smaller > arches it really starts to become a hassle imho.
Ok, now the concern is becoming more clear. You're intending to boot directly to the stage3 and not chroot into it, and so you want the stage3 to be a fully-functional userspace, though you don't actually need it to contain a kernel/bootloader. How do you even log into the stage3? Do we not disable the root password by default? Can you boot off of the minimal install image instead? Not sure if we have one of those for ARM. Actually, any boot image that sets up a network and supports chroot would work fine for your purposes. I do realize that many (all?) ARM platforms don't have a flexible bootloader like x86 typically does - so I'll let you speak to what makes sense here. Following the handbook, the network is established by the boot CD and all you do before chrooting is copy over your resolv.conf. In that environment there is no need to have a networking system pre-installed on the stage3. Oh, and if I'm not mistaken the stage3 is based on the system set which is established by the profile, so if it made sense to keep networking around for ARM that would be an option. Rich
