Re: [kvm-ppc-devel] upstream PowerPC qemu breakage

[Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>]

On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 22:22 +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> >> Unfortunately I wasn't able to get an F8 ppc rescue cd ISO to boot with 
> >> qemu 0.9.0.  Can you point me to a working combination?
> >>     
> >
> > It's difficult to get anything booting with upstream PowerPC qemu,
> > mostly because of the unmaintained firmware they use (called Open
> > Hackware).
> >
> > That said, upstream qemu does not support 440 cores, which is what our
> > KVM work is targeting. Also, Fedora 8 doesn't either, though it may be
> > possible to get F8 working by providing your own kernel and some small
> > configuration tweaks (inittab, securetty).
> >
> > There are other distributions that will work with little to no tweaking
> > for 440, but until we can get IO (other than console) working we have
> > been using very simple root filesystems.
> >
> > However, none of these will be useful to you in KVM unless you have a
> > 440 host to run them on.
> >
> > Originally you said you just need a kernel tree to build against. Can
> > you elaborate on what you're trying to do now?
> >   
> 
> I'd like to have a full setup so I can do run testing as well.

I'd love to help make this happen.

> I was thinking of running a ppc distro on qemu, and building and running 
> kvm-ppc on that to test.

This isn't going to work in the near future, because KVM today requires
a 440 host, and qemu today doesn't emulate 440 instructions.

> Even if  I don't run it, it's a much better 
> build-time environment.  Of course running the unit tests and an image 
> or two will be even better.
> 
> So, at best, I'd like an emulation environment that allows me to build 
> and run; at worst, build only.

Building would be better done with a cross-compiler than inside qemu.

-- 
Hollis Blanchard
IBM Linux Technology Center


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