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

[Josh Boyer]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:43:24 +0100
David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at 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 Time™ 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