[Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Peter Tribble]

Hi,

To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the successor
to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own illumos
distribution.

Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support for
SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
needs
to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.

I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with others in
the illumos
community to see if there are other resources we can bring to bear.

One of my interests here is the sparc support; it would be helpful for us
to have
a working sparc emulator, as only a few of us have actual sparc hardware,
and
the qemu sparc emulation has dramatically improved in the last couple of
releases - it would be unfortunate if we were then unable to make use of it.

Thanks,

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Peter Maydell]

On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com> wrote:
> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the successor
> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own illumos
> distribution.
>
> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support for
> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
>
> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with others in
> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring to bear.

Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.

Essentially what we need as upstream is:
 * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
   integration build testing, so we don't break compile
   support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
   somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
   want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
   that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
   KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
   up handling the BSDs)
 * somebody to look at the places where 'make && make check'
   currently fails and submit upstream patches for them. Kamil
   has been doing a great job here but would probably
   appreciate extra help :-)
 * somebody who's willing to be listed in our MAINTAINERS file
   as maintaining the port, so we can ask them questions if/when
   any platform-specific issues come up in future

Overall we're happy to continue to support hosts that people
are still using -- we just want to avoid blindly maintaining
code for platforms we can't test and where we don't have
any idea if anybody's even using it (for instance we just
dropped the support for AIX and for Itanium CPUs...)

thanks
-- PMM

Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 22/09/2017 14:05, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com> wrote:
>> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the successor
>> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own illumos
>> distribution.
>>
>> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
>> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support for
>> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
>> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
>>
>> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with others in
>> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring to bear.
> 
> Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
> cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.
> 
> Essentially what we need as upstream is:
>  * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
>    integration build testing, so we don't break compile
>    support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
>    somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
>    want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
>    that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
>    KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
>    up handling the BSDs)

I would even reverse the order since now we're handling the BSDs using
the VM test infrastructure.  Let's say having both would be best.

Paolo

>  * somebody to look at the places where 'make && make check'
>    currently fails and submit upstream patches for them. Kamil
>    has been doing a great job here but would probably
>    appreciate extra help :-)
>  * somebody who's willing to be listed in our MAINTAINERS file
>    as maintaining the port, so we can ask them questions if/when
>    any platform-specific issues come up in future
> 
> Overall we're happy to continue to support hosts that people
> are still using -- we just want to avoid blindly maintaining
> code for platforms we can't test and where we don't have
> any idea if anybody's even using it (for instance we just
> dropped the support for AIX and for Itanium CPUs...)
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM
> 

Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Peter Maydell]

On 22 September 2017 at 16:51, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 22/09/2017 14:05, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the successor
>>> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own illumos
>>> distribution.
>>>
>>> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
>>> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support for
>>> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
>>> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
>>>
>>> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with others in
>>> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring to bear.
>>
>> Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
>> cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.
>>
>> Essentially what we need as upstream is:
>>  * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
>>    integration build testing, so we don't break compile
>>    support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
>>    somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
>>    want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
>>    that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
>>    KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
>>    up handling the BSDs)
>
> I would even reverse the order since now we're handling the BSDs using
> the VM test infrastructure.  Let's say having both would be best.

I only have the one beefy machine to run VMs on, so the more
OSes we handle via VMs the more overloaded it gets. Also,
everything we have as a VM is another thing I have to maintain
and presumably update from time to time...

thanks
-- PMM

Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 5:10 PM, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
wrote:

> On 22 September 2017 at 16:51, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 22/09/2017 14:05, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the
> successor
> >>> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own
> illumos
> >>> distribution.
> >>>
> >>> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
> >>> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support
> for
> >>> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
> >>> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
> >>>
> >>> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with
> others in
> >>> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring
> to bear.
> >>
> >> Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
> >> cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.
> >>
> >> Essentially what we need as upstream is:
> >>  * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
> >>    integration build testing, so we don't break compile
> >>    support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
> >>    somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
> >>    want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
> >>    that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
> >>    KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
> >>    up handling the BSDs)
> >
> > I would even reverse the order since now we're handling the BSDs using
> > the VM test infrastructure.  Let's say having both would be best.
>
> I only have the one beefy machine to run VMs on, so the more
> OSes we handle via VMs the more overloaded it gets. Also,
> everything we have as a VM is another thing I have to maintain
> and presumably update from time to time...
>

Well, we have options.

Tribblix (http://www.tribblix.org/) is probably the easiest and lightest for
a VM. Works fine under KVM (not virtio-scsi, and I've had issues with
virtio networking). Just download the iso, install with

./live_install -B c1t0d0 kitchen-sink qemu

and you're good to go. (That's assuming you have network connectivity
during install, and I'm guessing at the probable disk device. Adding qemu
ought to grab all the dependencies.)

It's not too hard to give access to a running machine, although I
personally don't have any available right now (I could run one up
on AWS). Or the good folks at Joyent might be able to help out - I
can certainly ask them.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Kamil Rytarowski]

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Hello Peter Tribble,

Please see in-line.

On 22.09.2017 14:05, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com> wrote:
>> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the successor
>> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own illumos
>> distribution.
>>
>> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
>> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support for
>> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
>> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
>>

Sorry, this is harsh but Oracle Solaris support is now irrelevant. It's
impossible (or harder) to buy new licenses, it's dead now. There is no
evidence that qemu worked on it in the last ~10 years...

Solaris10 will be soon EOL'ed for Premier Support customers..

Solaris in pkgsrc has problems with basic packages (like toolchain).. I
would be surprised that it can build all qemu's dependencies..

>> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with others in
>> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring to bear.
> 
> Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
> cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.
> 

My interest starts on OSes using pkgsrc, and ends in the particular
SunOS case on SmartOS. Jonathan Perkin proposed to just fork older qemu
package for SmartOS in pkgsrc and I don't want to allow this to happen.
This motivates me to keep it alive upstream and retain 0 local patches.

I'm in process of upstreaming SmartOS support that should help to all
Illumos distributions. To reenable Illumos as a supported OS, please
follow the notes from Peter Maydell. I won't apply as a SmartOS
maintainer myself... at least in my free time.

> Essentially what we need as upstream is:
>  * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
>    integration build testing, so we don't break compile
>    support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
>    somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
>    want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
>    that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
>    KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
>    up handling the BSDs)
>  * somebody to look at the places where 'make && make check'
>    currently fails and submit upstream patches for them. Kamil
>    has been doing a great job here but would probably
>    appreciate extra help :-)
>  * somebody who's willing to be listed in our MAINTAINERS file
>    as maintaining the port, so we can ask them questions if/when
>    any platform-specific issues come up in future
> 
> Overall we're happy to continue to support hosts that people
> are still using -- we just want to avoid blindly maintaining
> code for platforms we can't test and where we don't have
> any idea if anybody's even using it (for instance we just
> dropped the support for AIX and for Itanium CPUs...)
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM
> 



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