Building using live CD

Robhogg · 04-10-2009, 08:07 PM

Hi,

Currently building LFS on an old machine, using the LFS live CD. However, I've run into what may turn out to be a major-ish hitch. After many hours of compiling gcc, it appears to have crashed out with:

Code:

device-mapper: snapshots: Invalidating snapshot: Error reading/writing
Buffer I/O/ error on device dm-0, logical block 208921
Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 0
EXT2-fs error (device dm-0): ext2_free_branches: Read failure, inode=98729, block=208921
<More Buffer I/O errors>

This seems to be an inherent problem when making heavy use of live distros - see Red Hat bug report. So:

I could just try again (and keep my fingers crossed), or
Install a very lightweight distro into the spare space on the disk (I have approx 6 gigs free, but only 48MB RAM on this PC), or
Do the initial build to first boot, with the drive hooked up to another PC (means that the initial tool-chain won't be built on the target processor, though)

Which would be best? For option 2, I could install DSL, but it doesn't come with any development tools and I couldn't tell the Kernel version from a quick glance. Puppy looks to be definitely out of my league. Has anyone any other suggestions?

Edited to add: Another idea occurred - how about if I copied the contents of the CD's /bin, /usr/bin (etc) to a directory on the hard drive, and then either modified $PATH or created links to those directories in /? A bit late to try it now, but has anyone any idea whether that would work?

Yours,
Rob

Robhogg · 04-11-2009, 05:17 AM

Trying the last approach. I've copied the contents of /bin and /usr/bin to $LFS/bin_tmp and $LFS/usr/bin_tmp. Had to use -P flag on cp, as so many of the files were actually soft links, and there were a couple that were relative links outside these directories (rcs2log and killall5) - I created similar _tmp directories, and copied across the targets.

I then modified $PATH (the unionfs wouldn't let me replace /bin and /usr/bin with soft links):

export PATH=/tools/bin:/mnt/lfs/bin_tmp:/mnt/lfs/usr/bin_tmp:/bin:/usr/bin

I've started the compilation of gcc again, while reciting the prayer of the sys-admin:

Quote:

Oh, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease...

The CD-ROM drive is still working, of course, as I haven't tried to copy across all the dependencies of the various utilities, but if I open another virtual terminal, the system is a lot more responsive than it was last night.

Robhogg · 04-11-2009, 05:24 PM

No joy, I'm afraid. After 11h29mins, the process exited reporting errors. According to the Debian web-site, it is possible to install in only* 44MB, so I'm going to try a minimal install in the spare space on the disk, and do the build with that.

* Eee... when I were a lad, if something had 8MB of RAM and an 80MHz processor, we thought it were a supercomputer!

Robhogg · 04-12-2009, 04:06 PM

Tch! Couldn't get Debian 5 to install at all! Have gone for the final option. Connected the HD up to another machine (Athlon XP, ¾GB RAM running CentOS). So far, so good. Have built gcc and glibc, and they passed the sanity check! What's more, the compile of gcc took less than 20 minutes

.

If anyone else is in a similar position, I found a document to take me through the intricacies of cross-compiling on the LFS web-site. Looks like it's for an earlier version of LFS, but no major problems yet.