FYI: libvirt / virt-install / virt-manager available on PPC in rawhide

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 01:41:54PM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:46:16 +0100
> "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > For Fedora 6 & 7, the virtualization management stack based on
> > libvirt was never built for PPC. This is because it depended on Xen
> > which was x86(_64) only. Since libvirt now has support for managing
> > QEMU / KVM too, and QEMU RPMs are available on PPC in Fedora, we have
> > removed the ExcludeArch from all the virt management RPMs. Xen
> > support in libvirt is still explicitly excluded on PPC - we only
> > build QEMU support. The build was just completed so RPMs should be
> > available in rawhide in the near future.
> > 
> > If the kernel-xen in Fedora ever gets PPC support we can also enable
> > libvirt to support Xen on PPC, but that's blocked on PPC kernel merge
> > & not aware of anyone actively working on that.
> 
> 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.

Dan.
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