AMD64 qemu completely broken?

Juergen Lock nox at jelal.kn-bremen.de
Thu Dec 4 13:25:04 PST 2008


On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 09:46:12PM +0100, I wrote:
> In article <7d6fde3d0812041105h43cf6586r5092e234a6350310 at mail.gmail.com> you write:
> >On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Are you running the ports version, or a different version, and/or are
> >>> you using kqemu (I've heard this was broken, in the past)? My group at
> >>> Cisco has several issues with older versions of qemu for PPC and when
> >>> we applied patches, it improved support greatly in some cases, and
> >>> introduced bugs in other cases =\.
> >>>
> >>> I'd definitely hit the devel list for QEMU and see what they say while
> >>> you're waiting for a more substantial reply here.
> >>
> >> I'm using the ports version.  I am using kqemu... although I can try without
> >> the kernel module later today.
> >>
> >> How out-of-date is the port?
> >
> >1. Try without kqemu :) (or at least rebuild it, then disable it if
> >you continue to run into problems).
> >2. emulators/qemu is the latest stable, but there are typically a
> >number of changes floating out in the devel branch
> >(emulators/qemu-devel) that might be of interest to you:
> >
> >[root at optimus /store]# grep -r ^PORTVERSION /usr/ports/emulators/qemu*
> >/usr/ports/emulators/qemu/Makefile:PORTVERSION= 0.9.1
> >/usr/ports/emulators/qemu-devel/Makefile:PORTVERSION=   0.9.1s.20080620
> 
> Yes, qemu-devel is worth a try.  I also post experimental port updates
> on -emulation once in a while that bring the qemu-devel port to more recent
> svn snapshots, like here:
> 	http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-emulation/2008-November/005530.html
> 
>  Oh and btw -kernel-kqemu is known to be broken with FreeBSD/amd64 guests,
> I was still able to boot 7.1-BETA2-amd64-livefs.iso into fixit->cdrom
> and try a few things in there using `regular' (userland) kqemu and my
> latest qemu-devel snapshot tho.

I forgot to say the qemu-devel port (as well as the later snapshots I
posted about on -emulation) also support -curses, which shows the emulated
vga text(!)console on qemu's tty.  This works quite well with FreeBSD guests
(even the isos) if you extend your xterm/whatever by one line (the default
vga textconsole is 80x25 instead of 80x24.)

 Of course if you have an installed guest you can also configure it for a
serial console (in a FreeBSD guest:)
	# echo console=\"comconsole\" >>/boot/loader.conf
	# sed -i -e '/^ttyd0/s/off/on/' /etc/ttys
and from then on run qemu with -nographic.  (with -nographic, the guest's
serial console and qemu's monitor are multiplexed on qemu's tty, hit ctrl-a
and then `h' to show a small help.)  -nographic also works with older
qemu versions.

 HTH,
	Juergen


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