[clug] Help with cloning an old Debian system please

[Richard Cottrill]

2008/8/19 Alex Osborne <ato at meshy.org>
>
> On 19/08/2008, at 3:06 PM, Stephen Hodgman wrote:
>
>> As for qemu, I was not aware of it at all.
>> What experience have you had with this?
>> It sounds an interesting thing to play with.
>
> Yes, it's a very handy tool.  I use it all the time for development for the ARM architecture.  You can use it as a VM (like virtualbox), or alternatively set it up so that executing a binary for a different architecture transparently invoke qemu.  In this mode, instead of creating a full blown VM with another kernel, it catches system calls and translates them into native ones, so for most intents and purposes it's as if the application is running natively.  This mode wouldn't really help in your case though of course, as you need the other kernel to provide the iBCS2 emulation. ;-)
<snip>

qemu can do some really bizarre things; but I've mostly used it for
x86 on x86 virtualisation.

The reference to "binfmt_misc" in the qemu docs
(http://bellard.org/qemu/qemu-doc.html#SEC65 ) is new to me:
http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/lxr/source/Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt
gives some suggestion that you could make the VM transparent to many
of the host's utilities, etc. (despite it running in a VM). I guess
take a lead from the java implementation...

Among the other features of the qemu suite, the qemu-img utility
allows you to setup (and translate between) a number of disk image
formats (raw, VMWare, qemu "native", raw partitions). In theory you
should be able to do (where /dev/hda is the disk you wish to wish to
turn into an image):
    qemu-img convert -f raw /dev/hda -O qcow2 qemu_image_qcow2.img

lilo "shouldn't" need fiddling afterwards.

Good luck,

Richard