sun4v in QEMU

Back in 2012 I played with sun4v emulation in QEMU, using it mostly instead of pain killers to get some distraction from a broken leg. The project was considered to be a toy, since I hadn’t expected to get it far enough to be useful for anything. I got it up to the OBP ok prompt, so it’s been sort of already useful at least for playing with post-sun4u OpenBoot and Forth.

Now I’m considering tidying up the code and submitting it upstream.  Tell you what.  Cleaning up the old code is pain. The usual problem with the quick and dirty code that you write once intending to throw it away immediately is that for whatever reasons this code is not thrown away in the 99% of cases. Instead it finds its way into production systems where it lives years and years.

So, a note to myself and the two other guys reading this blog: use a version control system (preferably git :-) ) for any project lasting more than 8 hours. Do it regardless whether you think you never going to need it.  I used to think a week is a good threshold, but even one week is way too much (and if you worked that week something like 16 hours a day, sorting out the mess you created would require some weeks).

Anyway, I’m back to my sun4v experiments.  How many weekends it’ll take to get it into a good shape? Let’s see.

Stay tuned.