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

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2007-08-25 at 22:30 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> I though that even with a working firmware the kernel was pretty much
> hosed to run in qemu.  I could be wrong though, happy to be.  If I
> could do my ppc tree testing emulated like while working remotely I'd
> be a very happy hacker.

I poked at it for a while, a few weeks ago. Booting is fairly screwy
because qemu seems to handle the '-kernel' image just as if it was a
hard drive. That might work for an i386 kernel which I think is still
mostly set up to be started from a floppy disk, but doesn't really work
too well when your kernel is an ELF file :)

You can boot it from a CD image, but its firmware doesn't actually run
FORTH scripts -- it just checks the CRC on them to see if they're
something it "knows", and takes appropriate action if so. It didn't know
the script we use on the Fedora boot media to check for 32-bit vs.
64-bit hardware, so it did nothing.

I hacked it to deal with that, and was putting my test kernels onto a
filesystem in a real hard drive image -- and the kernels were _starting_
to boot. Then I had MMU initialisation issues because the memory wasn't
correctly described in the device-tree. After I worked around that, it
crashed in IRQ controller initialisation, almost certainly also due to
lack of correct information in the device-tree. All of this was before
you see any _output_, so I had to connect to qemu with gdb and dump the
contents of the printk log buffer to see what was going on.

So you're right that if we work around the fact that the firmware can't
actually load a kernel, the kernel does crash. But I actually think
that's due to firmware problems too.

-- 
dwmw2