QEMU 4.1 and RISC-V

[Mitchell Horne]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 4:56 PM Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 10:48 PM Mitchell Horne <mhorne at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 29, 2019, 15:17 Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> I found that RISC-V test started failing recently:
> >> https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-riscv64-test/
> >>
> >> After some checking, I found the issue is our bbl image cannot boot
> >> with this command:
> >>
> >> qemu-system-riscv64 -nographic -m 2048M -kernel ./bbl
> >>
> >> in QEMU 4.1, while 3.1 and 4.0 are fine.  I've switched the QEMU
> >> version used in that job to 4.0, but I think it would be best if we
> >> can find the root cause is in FreeBSD or QEMU.
> >>
> >> Can anyone also help on this?
> >
> >
> > Hi Li-Wen,
> >
> > I can take a look in the coming week if you're okay with the workaround for the time being. Locally
> > I've had no issue running bbl with qemu 4.1 but perhaps there's something more specific that the
> > CI script is doing.
> >
> > I'm hoping we will soon be able to replace bbl with the more actively maintained OpenSBI firmware.
> > I have some pending changes that will allow us to boot FreeBSD with it, and after that I'd like to
> > create ports for both bootloaders, which I hope will make the CI setup a little simpler and less fragile
> > than building bbl currently is.
>
> Thanks very much, Mitchell,
>
> Let's narrow down the scope, are you using the qemu-devel pkg from
> official repository or building by yourself?
>

This was using qemu that I had built myself, but the executable from qemu-devel
works for me as well.

>
> And can you try this bbl image?
> https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/head/r352870/riscv/riscv64/bbl.xz

I had no issue booting this image with my self-built qemu or the one from
pkg. The only observable difference from qemu 3.1 is that a warning is
printed to stderr, but considering the CI script is timing out I don't think
that is the issue.

> Best,
> Li-Wen