[fedora-arm] F14 qemu arm default board

[Gordan Bobic]

omalleys at msu.edu wrote:
> In F14 x86, we finally have the ability to add an ARM based VM via the  
> libvirt management tool!! IE you can go through the GUI and set up an  
> qemu based arm VM*.

What's the performance like? Is there multi-core capability? I'm 
wondering if a 3+GHz Core2 can emulate an ARM fast enough to be faster 
than native. I very much doubt it, but it'd be a real boon for large 
cross-building.

> It defaults to the integratorcp board. But our image/kernel for F12 is  
> for the versatile board.)

This is something I'll be looking into soon. I really want to try to 
come up with the smallest possible number of kernels that will support 
the biggest range of devices. I'm not sure yet how plausible that is on 
the ARM, though.

> The physical specs for the integrator board support a max of 256 megs  
> of ram and only support the arm9 processors. I assume qemu only  
> supports this, or at least I ran into issues when i tried to bump up  
> the ram for the versatile boards.
> 
> I am -assuming- this isn't the fastest board/processor combo... Does  
> anyone have a clue what is? Then we can change it upstream and make a  
> f13-alpha image for it.

Is it armv5tel or something else? I can confirm that the f13 alpha image 
works fine on my Toshiba AC100. Haven't tried it on the Sheeva yet.

> *since we don't seem to support kickstart,

What's wrong with kickstart? Doesn't it work?

> and we don't have an  
> installer, you can really only import in an existing image. But hey it  
> is better then what we had!

My understanding is that the bigger problem is that a lot of ARM devices 
can't network boot. Some, like my AC100 don't even have an ethernet port 
(built in 3G, wifi, and USB ethernet bridge). Sheeva can TFTP boot a 
kernel, though.

The other complication is that boot-loaders are all over the place. 
Efika Genesi has a nice setup with a new uboot that looks for boot.scr 
in the root of the first partition and boots accordingly. I've not yet 
found any docs on doing that on the sheeva, but I'm hoping to reverse 
engineer the setup for it from the Genesi laptop, maybe next weekend. 
The Toshiba AC100 uses something different again.

I have no idea whether any of them will boot off a CD, but that might be 
an interesting experiment. If they can (they all have USB ports, so USB 
CD-ROM drives are a distinct possibility), then that would give a 
reasonably universal way of installing, but there'd be a real mess of 
custom boot-loader setups for all the different devices. Not sure 
there's a way around that at the moment. I certainly plan to try to get 
all of mine working in the same way with the same boot loader, but I'm 
not sure if I will succeed.

Plus, it'd be _REALLY_ nice if uboot were able to provide a boot menu 
and boot multiple kernels via boot.scr. It'd make botched kernel images 
much less problematic. But I'm not sure if it contains enough 
functionality for that.

Gordan