bionic (1) arch-test.1.gz

NAME

       arch-test - detect architectures your kernel can run binaries of

SYNOPSIS

       arch-test [-n]
              enumerates the architectures

       arch-test [-n] <arch>
              tests a single arch

DESCRIPTION

       When  called  without an argument, arch-test outputs the list of architectures executable by your running
       kernel, one per line, using Debian arch names.  Libc or other libraries are neither needed nor checked  —
       an arch is listed if its machine code can be executed and the appropriate syscall ABI is supported by the
       kernel.  This means, you can run these architectures in a chroot  or  a  container,  execute  them  using
       multiarch,  run  static  binaries,  etc.   The  ability to run additional architectures can be gained via
       binfmts on Linux, Linux emulation on BSD, etc.

       An architecture is considered runnable only if your kernel can run  unmodified  binaries,  without  extra
       steps  such  as  recompiling  (Raspbian  armhf)  or using brandelf on binaries you'd want to run (FreeBSD
       emulation of Linux).  Also, as Debian requires 686 on i386 as of the  stretch  release,  686  support  is
       checked for.

       If -n is specified, arch-test will try to disable known emulators (currently qemu and wine).  Note that a
       whole-machine emulator appears to be native as far as the kernel is concerned.

       When called with an arch name as an argument, arch-test  tests  the  specified  architecture.   A  human-
       friendly message will be printed, and the exit code can be:

       0      congratulations, the arch can be run on your kernel

       1      failure

       2      cannot check — arch-test lacks a helper for this arch

       (Shell hint: with set -e you write: ret=0; arch-test $ARCH || ret=$?)

   Helper programs
       The detection is done by small programs located in /usr/lib/arch-test/.  These programs check whether the
       running kernel can execute binaries of a given architecture.  When run, if successful, each such  program
       prints "ok" on stdout and returns exit code 0.

       When the check fails, these helper programs may die horribly — always with a non-zero exit code.  Usually
       the kernel will notice the incompatibility and nicely abort the attempt, but in some near-miss cases  the
       failure is more messy, such as SIGILL or SIGSEGV.  If you want to run the helpers directly, you'd want to
       redirect stderr to /dev/null and to disable core dumps (ulimit -c 0).

                                                                                                    arch-test(1)