Bootable QEMU image menagerie with rootless debootstrap

Quite some time ago I shared a script and methodology for performing a cross-architecture debootstrap in a rootless way. I had a short note on producing an image bootable in QEMU, but it was fairly minimal. This page provides a cookbook / quick reference on producing such images across various Debian target architectures supported by QEMU. The goal is that the starting point here "gets the basics right" for local experimentation, but of course you are encouraged to evolve the recipe for your needs. The basic process is to: Build a root filesystem with rootless-debootstrap-wrapper. Configure just enough networking, DNS, serial login, and SSH. Create a 30 GiB ext4 filesystem image directly with mkfs.ext4. Boot it with qemu-system-*, passing the Debian kernel and initrd directly. We use Debian trixie for amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, and s390x. We use sid for ppc64 big endian and loong64. I ran all of this on a current Arch Linux install. Common setup sudo pacman -S debootstrap…