I didn't write about SPARC emulation lately because I didn't work on it. But Mark Cave-Ayland is still working hard, so there is a lot of new stuff. The sun4m emulation has a new graphic adapter: cg3. Also the old adapter (tcx) supports acceleration.
And now, something really cool for the sun4u emulation. As of today git master has a working IOMMU support in qemu-system-sparc64! This means that you don't need to follow all the steps in
Debian/sparc64 Wheezy under QEMU How-To. Just insert your image into -cdrom and voilà!
Well done, Mark!
Now, while using an IDE drive simplifies the installation process a lot, using virtio still makes sense. Quick performance test:
root@debian-wheezy:~# dd if=/dev/vdb of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.56761 s, 66.9 MB/s
root@debian-wheezy:~# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 9.59107 s, 10.9 MB/s
Yes, IDE is slower, as the emulated kernel has to do more work, but still, the performance is pretty much ok.
Also, not every OS running on sun4u machines has support for virtio. From an undisclosed source I know that Mark is working on booting NetBSD/sparc64 under vanilla QEMU. Stay tuned. ;-)
And now, something really cool for the sun4u emulation. As of today git master has a working IOMMU support in qemu-system-sparc64! This means that you don't need to follow all the steps in
Debian/sparc64 Wheezy under QEMU How-To. Just insert your image into -cdrom and voilà!
Well done, Mark!
Now, while using an IDE drive simplifies the installation process a lot, using virtio still makes sense. Quick performance test:
root@debian-wheezy:~# dd if=/dev/vdb of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.56761 s, 66.9 MB/s
root@debian-wheezy:~# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 9.59107 s, 10.9 MB/s
Yes, IDE is slower, as the emulated kernel has to do more work, but still, the performance is pretty much ok.
Also, not every OS running on sun4u machines has support for virtio. From an undisclosed source I know that Mark is working on booting NetBSD/sparc64 under vanilla QEMU. Stay tuned. ;-)
