Re: [git pull] m68k updates for 3.8

[Greg Ungerer <gregungerer@westnet.com.au>]

On 12/15/2012 07:48 AM, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 12/14/2012 06:04:51 AM, Greg Ungerer wrote:
>> Hi Rob,
> ...
>>> Somebody got one of my images to boot under aranym but they had to patch
>>> the kernel fairly extensively to add the emulated device support that
>>> emulator provided. It doesn't emulate real devices the way qemu does,
>>> but qemu doesn't fully emulate the processor (just coldfire in
>>> mainline)...
>>
>> I use aranym for testing m68k. Though I don't really pound to heavily
>> on the devices. I really only cross-compile small systems for testing
>> on it.
>
> What kernel config do you use for aranym? I don't see an an aranym entry in
> arch/m68k/configs, and I stopped using it precisely because it required
> several large patches to add emulated device support for everything from
> serial console to block devices. (There was a kernel upgrade, it broke,
> I cut a release without it. Pretty much the same reason I stopped using
> squashfs for a year or so until it finally got merged.)

arch/m68k/configs/atari_defconfig

AranyM is an Atari emulator. As far as I know all the special device
support has been merged into mainline now.


> I can poke Laurent Vivier about possibly getting the qemu-system-m68k
> and the q800 board emulation to work better if there's interest from
> anyone other than me. (I just checked and it dies at the same place it
> did last year: setting up the page tables. The MMU emulation ain't
> there, and I haven't got documentation for it.)
>
> My interest is that my aboriginal linux setup builds the same system for
> a dozen different targets and then natively builds packages inside the
> emulator. This allows me to regression test if their behavior diverges,
> even from a cron job if I want to. From my viewpoint, the more targets
> the merrier.
>
> (I don't care hugely about which board emulation I'm using, the point is
> to run a native root filesystem including a native toolchain and build
> stuff locally on the board. This requires at least 256 megs of memory in
> the emulated board for gcc 4.2 (more for newer versions), and ideally I
> want a virtual network card so I can hook up distcc to the cross
> compiler and move the heavy lifting of compilation outside the emulator
> without reintroducing the whole "keep track of two simultaneous build
> contexts" complexity of cross compiling. So it's not "q800 vs aranym",
> it's "I already got qemu to emulate all the other targets I'm testing
> and it doesn't require an extensively patched kernel" vs "other emulator
> requiring patched kernel"...)

For whatever it is worth I don't run patched kernels under AranyM.
But I don't really care to much about the odd ball devices either
for most of the testing I use it for.

Regards
Greg