Blue Swirl wrote:
Hi,
Sorry for cross-posting (and because I used the wrong address in the
first time for KVM, sorry for the duplicate on Sparclinux).
Sparc host support for Qemu is getting close
to ready, I can already run a Sparc32 system emulator on
OpenBSD/Sparc64 and there is some limited success with recent glibc on
Linux/Sparc64. Otherwise Sparc32 target emulator is pretty stable.
Sparc64 target emulator can boot from several CD images, but crashes
pretty soon.
But I think we could already start early drafting of what KVM support
for Sparc32 and Sparc64 would mean. Because of certain problems in the
V9 instruction set design (V8 rett reuse for example), it may be
difficult or even impossible to use an accelerator if the host and
target instruction sets do not match.
I don't know much about the Sparc architecture, but the embedded PowerPC
port that Hollis has spear-headed is for an architecture that does not
natively support hardware virtualization. As long as Sparc meets all of
the requirements to do this sort of virtualization (all privileged
instructions are trappable when run in non-privileged mode), it should
be rather straight forward.
KVM has code to do shadow paging and also software TLB virtualization,
so depending on how Sparc manages the TLB, it should be pretty straight
forward to base the Sparc code from the appropriate code that already
exists.
Other possibilities include porting kqemu or Xen, but I think KVM has
the brightest future.
I'm interested in pushing the Qemu side forward, but obviously
something needs to be done by the kernel/KVM people too.
KVM supports x86, ia64, s390, and PPC today. I don't think there would
be any problems adding another architecture support. Almost all of the
abstractions should have been flushed out already by the previous
architecture ports. Moreover, since there is already good support for
Sparc in QEMU, that should simplify things significantly.
I'm looking forward to seeing the progress you make!
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
What is the
feeling on KVM and Sparclinux side?
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