1arch-test(1) General Commands Manual arch-test(1)
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6 arch-test - detect architectures your kernel can run binaries of
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9 arch-test [-n]
10 enumerates the architectures
11 arch-test [-n] [-c <chroot>] <arch>
13 tests a single arch
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16 When called without an argument, arch-test outputs the list of archi‐
17 tectures executable by your running kernel, one per line, using Debian
18 arch names. Libc or other libraries are neither needed nor checked —
19 an arch is listed if its machine code can be executed and the appropri‐
20 ate syscall ABI is supported by the kernel. This means, you can run
21 these architectures in a chroot or a container, execute them using mul‐
22 tiarch, run static binaries, etc. The ability to run additional archi‐
23 tectures can be gained via binfmts on Linux, Linux emulation on BSD,
24 etc.
25 An architecture is considered runnable only if your kernel can run un‐
27 modified binaries, without extra steps such as recompiling (Raspbian
28 armhf) or using brandelf on binaries you'd want to run (FreeBSD emula‐
29 tion of Linux). Also, as Debian requires 686 on i386 as of the stretch
30 release, 686 support is checked for.
31 If -n is specified, arch-test will try to disable known emulators (cur‐
33 rently qemu and wine). Note that a whole-machine emulator appears to
34 be native as far as the kernel is concerned.
35 With -c <chroot>, the test is done inside a given chroot (qemu-user be‐
37 fore 2.12 required the interpreter to live inside the chroot). Root
38 privileges are required here.
39 When called with an arch name as an argument, arch-test tests the spec‐
41 ified architecture. A human-friendly message will be printed, and the
42 exit code can be:
43 0 congratulations, the arch can be run on your kernel
45 1 failure
47 2 cannot check — arch-test lacks a helper for this arch
49 (Shell hint: with set -e you write: ret=0; arch-test $ARCH || ret=$?)
52 Helper programs
55 The detection is done by small programs located in /usr/lib/arch-test/.
56 These programs check whether the running kernel can execute binaries of
57 a given architecture. When run, if successful, each such program
58 prints "ok" on stdout and returns exit code 0.
59 When the check fails, these helper programs may die horribly — always
61 with a non-zero exit code. Usually the kernel will notice the incom‐
62 patibility and nicely abort the attempt, but in some near-miss cases
63 the failure is more messy, such as SIGILL or SIGSEGV. If you want to
64 run the helpers directly, you'd want to redirect stderr to /dev/null
65 and to disable core dumps (ulimit -c 0).
66 arch-test(1)