Saturday, January 21, 2017

sun4v emulation is in qemu master

sun4v emulation patches were merged into QEMU master on January, the 19th. Directly from my git tree. So now I'm a real co-maintaier. ;-)

13 comments:

jermar said...

Congratulations and thanks!

atar said...

You are welcome! I guess I already know what would be one of the images in the QEMU Advent calendar 2017. ;-)

the great quux said...

That's pretty cool! Do you think you might create a new installation HOWTO (or update the old one) to reference installing 64-bit Solaris versions with sun4u/sun4v? And which ones are supported with what models, etc?

atar said...

Currently it only boots Solaris 10 image supplied with the OpenSPARC project.
That's why I think it's too early for a howto. But it's pretty much described here: https://tyom.blogspot.de/2016/10/qemu-sun4vniagara-target-went-public.html with an update here: https://tyom.blogspot.de/2016/11/sun4v-emulation-update.html (the two blog posts preceding this one).

the great quux said...

Ok. Any update on the status of sun4u and whether it can boot any 64-bit Solaris images? As far as most of us go I think the completeness of the sun4m implementation is great, and it really helps us breathe a sigh of relief that we'll be able to keep a lot of stuff running that is tied to those old machines. :) But sun4m is limited to 512 MB of memory, even sun4u with a 32-bit kernel would at least be able to access 1 GB or more. I can't seem to get a sun4u host booted up with a 5.7 ISO (even if I specify the processor as UltraSparc I, which is supposed to have 64-bit disabled). Perhaps I should open a bug?

Unknown said...

Hello. how can i write you? I have a problem emulating a sun solaris 5.0 from a SPARC PC. Do you have an email address for it?

Thank you!

atar said...

For business proposals please use atar4qemu@gmail.com. Free consultations are done on qemu-devel@nongnu.org.

atar said...

the great quux, I'm not working at sun4u at the moment. Mark has also been busy the last couple of months, so I guess the sun4u status hasn't changed since the last ~half a year or so. It's actually in a pretty good shape, so running Solaris on it is a matter of weeks, not years. But currently I've got no customers/sponsors willing to have sun4u and have some other stuff to do for fun.

Jefferson said...

Hi guys.
First, "atar", I want to congratulate you for your great job.
I was looking a way to run a sparc 64bit Solaris 9 (emulate a Fujitsu PrimePower 1500 - sun4s) on qemu since 2016, specially by this blog.
It`s a project for the local government that I'm uncomfortable on spend public money, becouse it's a system that is very rarelly used.
It's a pitty that qemu can't run Solaris 9 on 64bit sparc, and I hope that someone could do that by some way.
If you have news, please, let us know.

atar said...

I think PrimePower is still faster than qemu on modern machines. What application are you running? The most stuff for Solaris 9 can run on a 32-bit machines.

Jefferson said...

Hi atar, thanks for your time.
This system runs a Sybase Database, that is accessed by only one user, one time per year, to extract reports, when asked by judicial mandacts, so, performance is not our problem.
But we are really concerned, becouse Fujitsu has no more support avaible options, and if this machine stops, we wont be able to extract this reports from it.
This machine is subutilized, but the data need to be disponible.
Any help wold be appreciated.
Thanks again.

Jefferson said...

And...
For licences porpouses, we need to maintain the orgininal installation of that Sybase database, including the binaries...

the great quux said...

Jefferson - the good news is he got Solaris 10 64-bit to run on the new 'niagara' type:
http://tyom.blogspot.com/2016/10/qemu-sun4vniagara-target-went-public.html

The bad news is, networking does not work, since the niagara PCI adapter isn't in QEMU right now. Someone has to implement it first apparently.