[fedora-arm] Trying to run Fedora-ARM as a virtual machine

[Gordan Bobic]

On 31/01/2011 21:03, Niels de Vos wrote:

>>> I'm looking into getting an ARM system as small home-server. Of course
>>> I'd like to run Fedora on it, but unfortunately it seems that current
>>> Fedora releases are not completely ready for this yet.
>>
>> It's probably ready enough. F12 is the stable one, and F13 alpha rootfs
>> is available. A few things are missing (a few important KDE parts, but
>> they do build OK on F12), and a few things are broken and unstable
>> (Firefox of the F12 vintage isn't of generically good enough quality to
>> handle bug-free running on ARM), but overall it's more than usable
>> enough. I run a F12/F13 hybrid (F12 rootfs yum updated to F13 alpha from
>> the koji repository where packages update cleanly) on my Sheevaplug
>> (Kirkwood ARMv5) and on my Toshiba AC100 (Tegra 2 ARMv7), and they work
>> quite well - certainly well enough for any common server tasks.
>>
>> You may want to check the archives and sign up to the redhat bugzilla
>> where bugs are tracked. I submitted a patch recently to add a feature to
>> rc.sysinit that changes the default kernel behaviour about alignment
>> errors. I suggest you apply it and set the default to fix+warn and file
>> bugzilla reports for all the apps that cause these warnings.
>>
>> Here's a direct link to the bugzilla report:
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673691
>
> Cool! I'm complete unaware what makes ARM a special architecture, so
> this is quite interesting. I've added some notes/thoughts to the bug,
> maybe it helps to get it included ;)

Thanks. I won't hold my breath for it, though. :)

>>> While I am checking the details of qemu and libvirt, I am wondering if
>>> there is a kernel available that has virtio support. If not, I will
>>> need to compile my own kernel, which feels a little silly.
>>> https://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org does only seem to have one kernel
>>> package available, and that is kernel-headers which I hardly can use
>>> for booting. I am wondering if there are any scratch-builds available
>>> that have a functioning vmlinz.
>>
>> You will almost certainly need to build your own kernel anyway, because
>> kernels on ARM are pretty CPU specific. While it has recently been
>> mentioned that there is a project underway to provide a small-ish set of
>> kernels to try to cover a majority of popular ARM devices, right now you
>> will almost certainly want to build your own kernel.
>
> Hmm, thats good to know. I was just hoping that there is something
> like a general basic arm kernel with all the modules, which boots on
> most boards, but would run sub-optimal.

No such thing at the moment. If you look through the kernel 
configuration options, there is no "generic" option - you have to select 
pretty specifically what you want it to run on, and there's no 
multi-choice on CPU selection.

>> ARM emulation using qemu on x86 is OK for minor things to begin with,
>> but performance is quite crippling.
>>
>> As for development on ARM and virtualization - I suggest you look at
>> Linux vserver. I have it pretty much working, but there are a couple of
>> bugs in the tools stemming from the fact that dietlibc isn't quite bug
>> free on ARM yet, but it's getting close (see this bug:
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667852 )
>
> Well, my laptop runs libvirt and I m quite happy with that. I'll stick
> with libvirt/qemu as that does not interfere with my 'production' VMs.
>
> Maybe you understood my question wrong... Gol i to do some
> development/tests on my x86_64 laptop, and then run the resulting
> packages on the hardware ARM.

I get it, but ARM emulated on x86 will run at a tiny fraction of native 
speed. You may well find it completely unusable.

Gordan