On Fri, Apr 24, 2026 at 4:32 PM John D. Baker <[email protected]> wrote: > > Not sure where to put this, so "netbsd-users@" seems like a good starting > point. > > I usually build packages for sparc natively, but only during cold-weather > months when the electric bills are lower and the added heat from the > machines is welcome. > > With NetBSD-11 nearing release, I wanted to set up building with a > 'qemu-system-sparc' guest since my build host is always on and has plenty > of RAM and processor capacity. (I tried the pkgsrc cross-building setup > once, but it screwed up my host packages in the process.) > > The host is NetBSD/amd64-10.1_STABLE w/12GB RAM and a quad-core processor. > The disk image for the guest is qcow2. I tried installing with "-machine > SS-20", but it would hang during the "running MAKEDEV" stage. Installing > as the default SS-5 had no problem. I would then shut the guest down > and restart it with "-machine SS-20 -cpu TI-SuperSparc-61 -m 2048" (I > wanted to use "-smp 4", but anything other than uniprocessor would hang > after "waiting 2 seconds for SCSI busses to settle". > > So, single-processor SS-20 with max RAM it is.
I used something between 256 and 512 mb ram for qemu-system-sparc guest ... Then I added second disk and set it up in guest as swap. I eventually worked out > how to get NFS working (export host-resident filesystems to 127/8 w/ > "-noresvport -noresvmnt" and add those flags on the file server to > exports to the host machine). I am using "-nic user,..." if that has > some bearing on the issue. > > When I set about to build the first package, the guest went down about > 3 levels of dependency and just sat there. 'top' on the host shows it > in "parked" state, occasionally moving from one CPU to another. Pressing > ctrl-T in the guest elicits the expected output, but it never (seems to) > progress. > > Any suggestions about what's going on? > > Anyone else using 'qemu-system-foo' to build packages for your RAM or > CPU-limited "foo" systems? With pkgsrc tree on NFS? Tips? Tricks? > Techniques? > > -- > |/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS NetBSD Darwin/MacOS X > |\ / jdbaker[snail]consolidated[flyspeck]net OpenBSD FreeBSD > | X No HTML/proprietary data in email. BSD just sits there and works! > |/ \ GPGkeyID: D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4 BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645
