Well, I don't have a X1 machine to compare my results with, but the IDE emulation in qemu-system-sparc64 is slow. I did some trivial performance tests a half year ago:
http://tyom.blogspot.de/2014/06/iommu-support-in-upstream-qemu-system.html The emulated IDE gave me ~11 MiB/s, which is probably below the X1 performance. OTOH, we don't have to stick to PATA: virtio gives ~66 MiB/s, and there are virtio drivers in Illumos, right? We just need to ensure that the Illumos virtio drivers can work when a host machine has different endianness that the guest. Artyom On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Alex McWhirter <[email protected]> wrote: > It would seem like if we ever wanted any serious movement on the SPARC from > then qemu would be a great asset, > > UltraSPARC II machines aren't too hard to find cheap (netra X1) but I would > bet qemu would be quite a bit quicker considering the X1 is limited by PATA > and PC133 memory. > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Nov 24, 2014, at 10:16 AM, Artyom Tarasenko via illumos-discuss > <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>> The *other* thing that would be enormously useful would be figuring out >>>> if we can boot any opensolaris on a qemu system running on any of >>>> illumos-x86, MacOS, or Linux. (Ideally it shouldn’t matter that much, >>>> but I don’t know how easy it is to use qemu SPARC emulations on >>>> different systems.) While this would be quite slow, I doubt it would >>>> be a lot slower than some actual SPARC hardware, when used with a very >>>> fast modern x86 CPU on the host. :-) >> >> Well, the emulated 32-bit CPUs are in fact faster than the real ones >> from the SPARCstation era. >> The emulated 64 bit SPARC machines are slower than the physical ones. >> But you are right, they are not a lot slower. >> >>> There is hacking to run Solaris 2.6 sparc on qemu. >>> http://brezular.com/2012/02/17/installation-solaris-2-6-sparc-on-qemu-part2-solaris-installation/ >> >> It's not limited to Solaris 2.6. Most of the other 32-bit versions can >> boot as well. >> The list of supported versions is here: >> >> http://tyom.blogspot.com/2009/12/solaris-under-qemu-how-to.html >> >> Since yesterday Solaris 9 can boot up to the single user mode under >> OpenBIOS as well. But I'm not sure whether the patch makes it into the >> upcoming QEMU 2.2 release. >> >> Artyom >> >> -- >> Regards, >> Artyom Tarasenko >> >> SPARC and PPC PReP under qemu blog: >> http://tyom.blogspot.com/search/label/qemu >> >> >> ------------------------------------------- >> illumos-discuss >> Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now >> RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/26830051-c017d896 >> Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; >> Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Regards, Artyom Tarasenko SPARC and PPC PReP under qemu blog: http://tyom.blogspot.com/search/label/qemu ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
