Trying to get MALTA64 running under qemu

[Juli Mallett]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Ben Morrow <ben at morrow.me.uk> wrote:

> Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > On 18 October 2014 15:59, Ben Morrow <ben at morrow.me.uk> wrote:
> > > I'm considering buying an ERL to use as a local router, but before I
> did
> > > I thought I'd make sure the ports I want to run work properly with
> MIPS,
> > > so I'm trying to bring up a qemu-system-mips64 instance. I've built
> > > world and kernel (using MALTA64) for mips.mips64, and built a disk
> image
> > > following the instructions on the MipsEmulation page on the wiki. The
> > > source I am using is a slightly patched 10-STABLE from 2014-09-09; the
> > > patches have nothing to do with MIPS.
> > >
> > > However, when I try to bring qemu up, the system appears to hang after
> > > probing the ata devices. Over the course of about 30 seconds the qemu
> > > process goes up to 100% of one CPU, and no more output appears on the
> > > console. This appears to happen regardless of the disk images I pass to
> > > qemu; I've tried passing a UFS image, a file full of zeros, no disks at
> > > all, and (just in case) both -hda and -hdc. I've included the boot log
> > > below; I'd appreciate any advice.
> >
> > can you try qemu-devel?
>
> Thank you, that works. (Good God, it's slow... I wonder how hard it
> would be to replace cc with something that runs a cross-compiler on the
> host? Maybe I can do something with distcc...)
>

The optimal thing here is to use a user-mode emulator, whereby you can
effectively run a MIPS userland through qemu on a FreeBSD host, so all of
the kernel stuff is being done natively — which is a lot for things like
package building; others have done this for ARM, and I believe that one of
the groups using FreeBSD/MIPS was looking at doing so for MIPS as well for
the sake of package builds, etc.  You might create a new thread for
user-mode MIPS emulation to see if any of the right people notice and
respond, or perhaps dig into what the ARM folks have done.

Thanks,
Juli.