Here are the commands I used to setup the base image:
I first tried running RISC-V Qemu on Buster, but even ls didn’t work properly and the installation failed.
When I ran it on Unstable ls works but strace doesn’t work in a chroot, this gave enough functionality to complete the installation.
When running the VM the operation was noticably slower than the emulation of PPC64 and S/390x which both ran at an apparently normal speed. When running on a server with equivalent speed CPU a ssh login was obviously slower due to the CPU time taken for encryption, a ssh connection from a system on the same LAN took 6 seconds to connect. I presume that because RISC-V is a newer architecture there hasn’t been as much effort made on optimising the Qemu emulation and that a future version of Qemu will be faster. But I don’t think that Debian/Bullseye will give good Qemu performance for RISC-V, probably more changes are needed than can happen before the freeze. Maybe a version of Qemu with better RISC-V performance can be uploaded to backports some time after Bullseye is released.
Here’s the Qemu command I use to run RISC-V emulation:
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 | Code: qemu-system-riscv64 -machine virt -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -drive file=/vmstore/riscv,format=raw,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd1 -drive file=/vmswap/riscv,format=raw,id=hd1 -m 1024 -kernel /boot/riscv/vmlinux-5.10.0-1-riscv64 -initrd /boot/riscv/initrd.img-5.10.0-1-riscv64 -nographic -append net.ifnames=0 noresume security=selinux root=/dev/vda ro -object rng-random,filename=/dev/urandom,id=rng0 -device virtio-rng-device,rng=rng0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=02:02:00:00:01:03 -netdev tap,id=net0,helper=/usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper |  |
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Currently the program /usr/sbin/sefcontext_compile from the selinux-utils package needs execmem access on RISC-V while it doesn’t on any other architecture I have tested. I don’t know why and support for debugging such things seems to be in early stages of development, for example the execstack program doesn’t work on RISC-V now.
RISC-V emulation in Unstable seems adequate for people who are serious about RISC-V development. But if you want to just try a different architecture then PPC64 and S/390 will work better.