Matt,
qemu-system-arm, qemu-system-ppc64, etc. in our environment are all x86
packages, but they perform system-mode emulation (via dynamic
instruction translation) for those target environments. So, you run
qemu-system-ppc64 on an x86 host in order to get a ppc64-emulated VM.
Our use case is specifically directed at reverse engineering binaries
and fuzzing for vulnerabilities inside of those architectures for things
that aren't built for x86, but there are others.
If you were to apt-get install qemu-system and then hit autocomplete,
you'd get a list of archiectures that qemu can emulate on x86 hardware -
that's what we're trying to do incorporate. We still want to run normal
qemu-x86 with KVM virtualization extensions, but we ALSO want to run the
other emulators without the KVM virtualization extensions in order to
have more choice for target environments.
So to me, openstack would interpret this by checking to see if a target
host supports the architecture specified in the image (it does this
correctly), then it would choose the correct qemu-system-xx for spawning
the instance based on the architecture flag of the image, which it
currently does not (it always choose qemu-system-x86_64).
Does that make sense?
Chris
---
v/r
Chris Apsey
bitskr...@bitskrieg.net
https://www.bitskrieg.net
On 2018-08-08 03:07 PM, Matt Riedemann wrote:
On 8/7/2018 8:54 AM, Chris Apsey wrote:
We don't actually have any non-x86 hardware at the moment - we're just
looking to run certain workloads in qemu full emulation mode sans KVM
extensions (we know there is a huge performance hit - it's just for a
few very specific things). The hosts I'm talking about are normal
intel-based compute nodes with several different qemu packages
installed (arm, ppc, mips, x86_64 w/ kvm extensions, etc.).
Is nova designed to work in this kind of scenario? It seems like many
pieces are there, but they're just not quite tied together quite
right, or there is some config option I'm missing.
As far as I know, nova doesn't make anything arch-specific for QEMU.
Nova will execute some qemu commands like qemu-img but as far as the
virt driver, it goes through the libvirt-python API bindings which
wrap over libvirtd which interfaces with QEMU. I would expect that if
you're on an x86_64 arch host, that you can't have non-x86_64 packages
installed on there (or they are noarch packages). Like, I don't know
how your packaging works (are these rpms or debs, or other?) but how
do you have ppc packages installed on an x86 system?
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