Virtualized Build environments

[Warren Togami]

On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 08:31, Rik van Riel wrote:
> At the moment I'm planning to use user mode linux for "virtual
> build boxes" as well as simple virtual test systems. I know it's
> not as efficient as chroot environments, but it does allow for
> more flexibility.
> 

Are UML kernels capable of true NPTL build environment internally?  Some
./configure scripts try to detect the presence of NPTL during build
time, which ends up with strange results when running the resulting
binaries.

Have you considered vservers rather than chroot or UML?  Fedora Linux
project is currently working on adopting Thomas Vander Stichele's mach
autobuild system from chroot to vservers, while some kernel hackers are
working on porting vserver w/ security context patch to work with RH's
NPTL kernel.

The benefit of vservers is almost no additional overhead in
virtualization, while being able to present a true build environment to
the build process while theoretically preventing root exploits hidden in
SRPMS from breaking out of the vserver chroot.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mach/
Try the current CVS snapshot of mach, (grab component mach2 written in
python, mach is the old version written in Makefile).  Thomas wrote an
excellent framework for auto-creation of build root chroots,
auto-dependency resolution, build, collect build logs, etc.

Warren