sparc?

[Tom Horsley]

I see qemu-system-sparc installed in fedora 18, so I'm now
curious:

If I DDed the disk from an old sun workstation we have
could I go into virt-manager and create a new virtual
machine pointing at that disk image and saying it is
a sparc architecture?

Or is it still more complicated than that to get
anything other than x86 architectures to run? (Yes,
I know it would be slow even if it did work :-).

[Cole Robinson]

On 02/03/2013 02:28 PM, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I see qemu-system-sparc installed in fedora 18, so I'm now
> curious:
>
> If I DDed the disk from an old sun workstation we have
> could I go into virt-manager and create a new virtual
> machine pointing at that disk image and saying it is
> a sparc architecture?
>
> Or is it still more complicated than that to get
> anything other than x86 architectures to run? (Yes,
> I know it would be slow even if it did work :-).

libvirt/virt-manager generally have problems building command lines for
non-x86 guests. PPC and s390 have had some specific work, but I know arm still
has issues. Some of this is virt-manager specifying a non-working config, and
some of it is libvirt hardcoding x86 cli assumptions. Nothing is fundamentally
broken though, just no one has done the work.

And then there's the question of qemu-system-sparc even working. I know people
do use and test it upstream but it doesn't see wide usage, and I wouldn't be
surprised if it's only tested with a narrow band of input.

But I'd be interested to hear your results if you give it a shot :) I'm sure
the qemu guys would as well. And even a bug report if it fails with
virt-manager would be useful.

Thanks,
Cole

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 02:28:16PM -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I see qemu-system-sparc installed in fedora 18, so I'm now
> curious:
>
> If I DDed the disk from an old sun workstation we have
> could I go into virt-manager and create a new virtual
> machine pointing at that disk image and saying it is
> a sparc architecture?
>
> Or is it still more complicated than that to get
> anything other than x86 architectures to run? (Yes,
> I know it would be slow even if it did work :-).

You may as well try it, but I think you'd be extraordinarily fortunate
if it actually worked.

As Cole said, it's unlikely that libvirt will be able to drive
qemu-system-sparc correctly so your best bet would be to use the
direct command line, ie:

qemu-system-sparc -M <something> -m <something> -hda /path/to/disk.img

If this doesn't work (and as I said I'd be surprised if it did) you
will need to contact the qemu upstream community to work out what's
going wrong.

http://wiki.qemu.org/MailingLists

Rich.