Re: [Qemu-devel] how is the status of sparc virtualization

[Blue Swirl]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 13:19, Greg Stevn <address@hidden> wrote:
> Is there virtualization method for sparc on linux?

KVM for Sparc does not exist, it would need some effort from both
QEMU(-kvm) and kernel side.

Sparc is in theory not as ugly as x86 in this area, user space has
been cleanly separated from privileged code from day one. But running
a 32 bit guest kernel on 64 bit hardware would not be easy or give
high performance due to V8/V9 privileged/unprivileged instruction
overlap. Hardware virtualization support is only available T1 onwards
but it doesn't cover 32 bit guest OS.

Sparc32 emulation (QEMU without KVM) is pretty much complete, Sparc64
needs more work. There hasn't been much interest for Sparc host
support.