Building a Gentoo chroot in Android
Preface
Chrooting is usually a key part in installing a GNU/Linux system, and there's no difference here in my GSoC 2018 work. In this article we'll build a Gentoo chroot with CHOST=aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu, set up ssh connection to it, and install some necessary tools.
Preparation work
First of all, we need to find somewhere to store our chroot. Connect the phone to the computer, authorize adb access on the phone, then issue the following:
$ adb root # remember to enable root access for adb in Developer Options
restarting adbd as root
$ adb shell
angler:/ # mkdir -p /data/gentoo && cd /data/gentoo
angler:/data/gentoo #
Then, we need to fetch the stage3 image corresponding to the architecture--aarch64 for Nexus 6P. Currently, aarch64 stages are not stable yet. The current status of Gentoo's ARM64 Project can be found here. According to the developers on gentoo-dev in this email, despite the fact that arm64 is still experimental for Gentoo, development is definitely taking place and we're getting packages keyworded every day. Consequently, arm64 seems to be a better choice than arm.
As no arm64 profiles are stable as of writing, I'll use the experimental stages, and they're located in experimental/arm64 in the Gentoo mirror you choose. The link I used is here. You can either download the tarball on your device directly, or transfer it to the phone via adb push after downloading it on your computer. Move the tarball to /data/gentoo/ for the next step.
Unpack tarball, mount filesystems, and chroot
Unpack the tarball:
angler:/ # cd /data/gentoo
angler:/data/gentoo # tar xvf stage3-*.tar.bz2
( ... lines of output elided ... )
angler:/data/gentoo # ls
bin boot dev etc home lib lib64 media mnt opt proc root run sbin sys tmp usr var
angler:/data/gentoo #
Clean up the bogus device nodes in stage3 tarball, and mount the necessary psuedo-filesystems:
angler:/data/gentoo # rm -rf dev/* tmp/*
angler:/data/gentoo # for a in proc sys dev; do mount --rbind {/,}$a && mount --make-rslave $a; done
angler:/data/gentoo # mkdir -p dev/shm
angler:/data/gentoo # chmod 777 dev/shm
angler:/data/gentoo # mount -t tmpfs tmpfs dev/shm
angler:/data/gentoo # mount -t devpts -o gid=5 devpts dev/pts # requirement of portage's configure
angler:/data/gentoo # mount -t tmpfs tmpfs tmp
Change root into /data/gentoo, set up timezone, resolv.conf, ssh public keys, and edit make.conf so we have an environment that works properly.
angler:/data/gentoo # chroot . /bin/su
localhost / # echo "nameserver 101.6.6.6" >> /etc/resolv.conf
localhost / # echo "Asia/Shanghai" > /etc/timezone
localhost / # emerge-webrsync
( ... lines of output elided ... )
localhost / # emerge --config timezone-data
( ... lines of output elided ... )
localhost / # emerge -v mosh --autounmask-write
( ... lines of output elided ... )
localhost / # ssh-keygen -A
ssh-keygen: generating new host keys: RSA DSA ECDSA ED25519
We can now connect to the chroot environment via mosh. For ease of starting the environment, we create the following script /data/gentoo/start_chroot:
#!/system/bin/sh
mount --rbind /proc /data/gentoo/proc
mount --make-rslave /data/gentoo/proc
mount --rbind /sys /data/gentoo/sys
mount --make-rslave /data/gentoo/sys
mount --rbind /dev /data/gentoo/dev
mount --make-rslave /data/gentoo/dev
mkdir -p /data/gentoo/dev/shm
chmod 777 /data/gentoo/dev/shm
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /data/gentoo/dev/shm
mount -t devpts -o gid=5 devpts /data/gentoo/dev/pts
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /data/gentoo/tmp
exec chroot /data/gentoo /usr/sbin/sshd
After the system reboots, we can issue the following to bring up the sshd inside the chroot:
$ adb root
restarting adbd as root
$ adb shell /data/gentoo/start_chroot
$
And, as a bonus, we can restart adbd on the phone to kill all process spawned by it, including the entire chroot:
$ adb unroot