Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi!

Has anyone had any success recently booting Debian on qemu-system-alpha?

I just built qemu-system using the alpha-softmmu target from git and tried
to run Debian's Alpha port but the output hangs very early:

root@nofan:/local_scratch/alpha-system> ./qemu-system-alpha -m 512 -nographic -drive file=disk.img,media=disk,format=raw,index=0 -L pc-bios/ -kernel vmlinux -append ‘console=ttyS0’ -initrd initrd.gz -net nic -net user -drive file=debian-10.0-alpha-NETINST-1.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom
PCI: 00:00:0 class 0300 id 1013:00b8
PCI:   region 0: 10000000
PCI:   region 1: 12000000
PCI: 00:01:0 class 0200 id 8086:100e
PCI:   region 0: 12020000
PCI:   region 1: 0000c000
PCI: 00:02:0 class 0101 id 1095:0646
PCI:   region 0: 0000c040
PCI:   region 1: 0000c048
PCI:   region 3: 0000c04c

Debian ISO taken from [1].

Adrian

> [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2019-01-25/debian-10.0-alpha-NETINST-1.iso

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[Richard Henderson]

On 1/24/20 6:16 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Has anyone had any success recently booting Debian on qemu-system-alpha?
> 
> I just built qemu-system using the alpha-softmmu target from git and tried
> to run Debian's Alpha port but the output hangs very early:
> 
> root@nofan:/local_scratch/alpha-system> ./qemu-system-alpha -m 512 -nographic -drive file=disk.img,media=disk,format=raw,index=0 -L pc-bios/ -kernel vmlinux -append ‘console=ttyS0’ -initrd initrd.gz -net nic -net user -drive file=debian-10.0-alpha-NETINST-1.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom
> PCI: 00:00:0 class 0300 id 1013:00b8
> PCI:   region 0: 10000000
> PCI:   region 1: 12000000
> PCI: 00:01:0 class 0200 id 8086:100e
> PCI:   region 0: 12020000
> PCI:   region 1: 0000c000
> PCI: 00:02:0 class 0101 id 1095:0646
> PCI:   region 0: 0000c040
> PCI:   region 1: 0000c048
> PCI:   region 3: 0000c04c

Works for me, from this morning's git (ba2ed84fe6a7).  I certainly get all the
way to the "Select a language" screen of the installer.

Oh.  Hah!  I just tried again, cutting and pasting your command-line.  You've
got unicode quotes, not ascii ' (\x27).  That gets passed through to the kernel
as-is and prevents console=ttyS0 from being parsed properly.

So the kernel output simply isn't going where you thought, and in this case,
nowhere at all.


r~

Re: Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 1/24/20 9:19 PM, Richard Henderson wrote:
> Oh.  Hah!  I just tried again, cutting and pasting your command-line.  You've
> got unicode quotes, not ascii ' (\x27).  That gets passed through to the kernel
> as-is and prevents console=ttyS0 from being parsed properly.

Good catch. That helped. Thanks.

I'm considering setting up two qemu-based buildds for alpha in the cloud now.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 1/24/20 9:52 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 1/24/20 9:19 PM, Richard Henderson wrote:
>> Oh.  Hah!  I just tried again, cutting and pasting your command-line.  You've
>> got unicode quotes, not ascii ' (\x27).  That gets passed through to the kernel
>> as-is and prevents console=ttyS0 from being parsed properly.
> 
> Good catch. That helped. Thanks.
> 
> I'm considering setting up two qemu-based buildds for alpha in the cloud now.

Nice!

Looking at cloud provider default plans, and problems with buildd on 
other archs (mipsel in particular) I recommend you to use at least 2GB 
instead of 512MB.

Re: Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 1/27/20 8:47 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> I'm considering setting up two qemu-based buildds for alpha in the cloud now.
> 
> Nice!
> 
> Looking at cloud provider default plans, and problems with buildd on other archs
> (mipsel in particular) I recommend you to use at least 2GB instead of 512MB.

Sure. I have two free cloud VMs which I will use for the alpha buildds. We're
already using qemu for builds in Debian.

For m68k and sh4, we're using qemu-user which helped discovering a lot of bugs,
especially with qemu-user. Currently, we can't use qemu-system on m68k and sh4
since the system memory is limited there to 1 GiB and 64 MiB, although the latter
is a limitation by qemu as far as I know.

For riscv64, most buildds in Debian and build workers in openSUSE are based on
qemu-system as cheap riscv64 hardware is still very hard to come by.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913