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I'm trying to install a VM with armhf on an amd64 system with:

virt-install -n test2 -r 2048 --os-type=linux --disk ~/armhf.img,device=disk,bus=virtio,size=8,sparse=true,format=raw --os-variant debian10 --vnc  --location ftp://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/dists/buster/main/installer-armhf/

This results in an error:

Starting install...
ERROR    Couldn't find kernel for Debian tree.
Domain installation does not appear to have been successful.
If it was, you can restart your domain by running:
  virsh --connect qemu:///session start test2
otherwise, please restart your installation.

What does this error mean in particular? How could I fix this?

Michael Hampton
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TSwerk
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1 Answers1

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The error means that virt-install doesn't know where to grab a kernel from that URL tree. This is possibly a virt-install deficiency but it's not clear to me if that URL is even an install tree, or just for netbooting.

If you are trying to boot a pre-existing disk image, you can try downloading the kernel and initrd manually from that tree, and passing them to virt-install --boot kernel=X,initrd=Y. But I'm not sure if the virt-install+libvirt combo has good support for booting these debian arm VMs, it may use incorrect defaults.

It may be easier to use qemu directly. Google gives me: https://translatedcode.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/installing-debian-on-qemus-32-bit-arm-virt-board/

(Also, use http://, it is much faster than ftp://)

Cole Robinson
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