On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:43:24 +0100
David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org> wrote:
On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 18:59 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > So I'm not sure how you'd prevent this, but qemu cannot emulate
> > usefully a fully working ppc(64) guest. There are lots of problems
> > there, and a non-existant upstream for it. So you might be able to use
> > libvirt + qemu to emulate x86 on ppc, but not ppc itself.
>
> Ah that's useful info - i saw a qemu-system-ppc binary in the QEMU RPM
> and thus assumed it was working. If it doesn't work we can easily change
> the whitelist in libvirt - we basically just list all qemu-system-XXX
> binaries which we think work reasonably.
I don't think there's any particular problem with qemu-system-ppc per
se; it's more the _firmware_ we use in it, which is a quick hack which
was just about sufficient to get older kernels (and AIX etc.) working.
These days, it isn't really sufficient. New kernels expect a sane and
complete device-tree, etc.
At some point in my Copious Spare Timeā¢ I mean to try to fix it, or
maybe even port the version of OpenFirmware that we're using on OLPC.
Spare time hasn't exactly been copious recently though :)
In the meantime, David Gibson and Rob Landley have been working on
porting PReP to arch/powerpc. Rob is using qemu as his "platform", so
there may be some kernels that run on it as-is soon.
josh