Re: [Qemu-devel] Best qemu ARM board supporting 1G+ ?

[Peter Maydell]

On 12 July 2011 12:36, Wesley W. Terpstra <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have a arm/versatileab running debian/sid, but this only has access
> to 256MB of main memory. For my current project I need a minimum of
> 1GB. I know that the realview-pbx-a9 can do this, but am unsure how
> well its supported.
>
> 1. Which qemu ARM boards support >= 1GB of memory?

realview-pb-a8, realview-pbx-a9 and vexpress-a9.

> 2. Which of those can run a linux kernel reliably enough to host debian?

They should all be OK to run the kernel. (You may find that you
need to tweak some kernel config options, eg disable perf support,
or patch qemu to support the perf regs.) The one I use most is
vexpress-a9. But at a board level none of them differ all that
much from each other (they're not compatible, but any bug you
run into in one you'll probably hit in the others too).

Note that the 0.14.x releases all have known bugs in the ARMv7
support; current git master is much better in this regard.

Unfortunately all three of these boards have no PCI support,
which means no SCSI, so disk is going to be SD card. There
seems to be a nasty performance problem with the SD card emulation
to the point where anything doing heavy I/O is either very slow
or appears to lock up. (That's on my todo list to investigate
but so are a lot of other things :-( )

-- PMM