Re: [PLUG] Dancing about Architecture

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 3:57 PM, Ron Mansolino <rmsolino@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> debian:/opt/splunk# uname -m
> x86_64
> debian:/opt/splunk# dpkg --print-architecture
> i386
> debian:/opt/splunk# arch
> x86_64
>

Ok, your kernel appears to be 64-bit, but I assume that the dpkg
command you used is telling you that you have a 32-bit userspace
installed (I don't really use deb/rpm much).  My guess is that you
don't have 64-bit glibc/binutils/etc needed to actually run 64-bit
binaries.

If you run something like readelf -l <path-to-binary> the INTERP
header will contain the path to the linker the kernel will use by
default, and if that linker isn't installed it won't run.  On my
distro a 64-bit ELF will point to /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2.  Then,
if that linker is present you still need to have any libraries it
needs installed (you can identify these with ldd, assuming you have a
working linker).  That is just going off the top of my head - I didn't
try copying a 64-bit ELF to a 32-bit container to see all the things
that could go wrong.

Honestly, you're probably best off just doing a clean install of a
64-bit distro, either on the host, or maybe in a container/chroot (I'd
think you could run a 64-bit container from a 32-bit host userspace as
long as the kernel is 64-bit, but I've never tried).  Maybe your
distro supports layering a 64-bit userspace on top of a 32-bit one but
unless it was designed for that I can think of a bunch of things that
could go wrong.  Different distros have had varying approaches to what
goes in /lib vs /lib32 vs /lib64 over the years, and you don't want to
overwrite 32-bit stuff with 64-bit stuff or else your 32-bit userspace
will stop working.

If you got really creative with building stuff yourself you could
probably get this all working on the side in an otherwise 32-bit
distro (similar to how Gentoo Prefix works), but you'll probably find
Linux From Scratch easier to set up.  It is typically pretty easy to
run 32-bit stuff from a 64-bit distro (most support multilib by
default, or at least optionally), but doing the reverse tends to be
very painful.

-- 
Rich
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