Further research shown that the issue is that NPTL (Native Posix Threads) is not supported for i386 user mode emulation. That causes the described issue in binaries compiled with NPTL (most modern ones).
One way to fix this that worked for me is a patch from here: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/45206 I was able to chroot into i386 on mipsel host with this one, and it mostly worked, no problems running other programs from bash. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/739785 Title: qemu-i386 user mode on ARMv5 host fails (bash: fork: Invalid argument) Status in QEMU: New Bug description: Good time of day everybody, I have been trying to make usermode qemu on ARM with plugapps (archlinux) with archlinux i386 chroot to work. 1. I installed arch linux in a virtuabox and created a chroot for it with mkarchroot. Transferred it to my pogo plug into /i386/ 2. I comiled qemu-i386 static and put it into /i386/usr/bin/ ./configure --static --disable-blobs --disable-system --target-list=i386-linux-user make 3. I also compiled linux kernel 2.6.38 with CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC=y and installed it. uname -a Linux Plugbox 2.6.38 #4 PREEMPT Fri Mar 18 22:19:10 CDT 2011 armv5tel Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l) Marvell SheevaPlug Reference Board GNU/Linux 4. Added the following options into /etc/rc.local /sbin/modprobe binfmt_misc /bin/mount binfmt_misc -t binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc echo ':qemu-i386:M::\x7fELF\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x03\x00:\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xfe\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfb\xff\xff\xff:/usr/bin/qemu-i386:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register 5. Also copied ld-linux.so.3 (actually ld-2.13.so because ld- linux.so.3 is a link to that file) from /lib/ to /i386/lib/ 6.Now i chroot into /i386 and I get this: [root@Plugbox i386]# chroot . [II aI hnve ao n@P /]# pacman -Suy bash: fork: Invalid argument 7.I also downloaded linux-user-test-0.3 from qemu website and ran the test: [root@Plugbox linux-user-test-0.3]# make ./qemu-linux-user.sh [qemu-i386] ../qemu-0.14.0/i386-linux-user/qemu-i386 -L ./gnemul/qemu-i386 i386/ls -l dummyfile BUG IN DYNAMIC LINKER ld.so: dl-version.c: 210: _dl_check_map_versions: Assertion `needed != ((void *)0)' failed! make: *** [test] Error 127 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/739785/+subscriptions
