[Qemu-devel] Experiences with qemu-system-ppc

[Julian Seward]

What are the prospects for qemu-system-ppc being improved to the
point where I can do a vanilla install of popular ppc32-linux
distros?

I've tried a vanilla install of Debian Sarge (3.1).  That went
smoothly, except for the stage right at the end, where the disk
image is made bootable.  The resulting disk image is, despite
much messing around, not bootable (using QEMU from cvs).

Vesselin Peev made a ppc32 Debian Sarge image with a specially
modified external kernel to work around this problem 
(http://free.oszoo.org/ftp/images/debian_sarge_ppc.tar.torrent)
and that does work.  Unfortunately QEMU consumes 100% host CPU
even when the virtual machine is idle, which means it's not useful
for a long-running virtual server.  And the reliance on a specially
modified kernel means normal updating/upgrading of the virtual
machine isn't possible.

My goal is to run a farm of QEMU virtual ppc32 machines to do
overnight builds/tests of Valgrind on different ppc32 distros.

J