chroot with --userspec when chrooting from x86_64 to i686

[John Lane]

Hello, this is my first post here, I hope this is the right place to ask this question. I have also asked this on Stack Exchange but I think this might be a more appropriate audience. I hope that's ok. I'm experencing a problem with chroot and I am running on Arch Linux x86_64.

I have a 64 bit chroot and a 32 bit chroot. They are identical except that one is 32 bit and one is 64 bit.

I can enter either of them using "chroot /path/to/chroot". No problems.

If I want to do that as a specific user the command is "chroot --userspec=user:group /path/to/chroot"

This also works fine for the 64 bit chroot. However it fails for the 32 bit chroot. It fails with status 125 and the message "chroot: invalid user"

Also, doing "chroot --userspec=uid:gid /path/to/chroot" works fine in both 32 and 64 bit chroots (uid and gid are the numeric ids of the required user and group).

(All commands are issued as root.) 

I am using a work around for this problem. Assuming $user has the user:group I want (e.g. john:users), I do this:

u=$(echo $user | awk -F ":" '{print $1}')
g=$(echo $user | awk -F ":" '{print $2}')
uid=$(grep $u /opt/chroot32/etc/passwd | awk -F ":" '{print $3}')
gid=$(grep $g /opt/chroot32/etc/group  | awk -F ":" '{print $3}')
echo "Using $uid:$gid in place of $user"
chroot --userspec="$uid:$gid" /opt/chroot32

This works - it looks up the desired user:group inside the chroot's passwd and group files and then uses those for the chroot. And the above workaround is not necessary when accessing a 64 bit chroot.

I don't know why I am experiencing this inconsistent behaviour, whether it is a bug or if it's due to me doing something wrong.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.