Dear all,
please, do not proceed removing KVM support to Book3e.
The PowerProgressCommunity, our not-for-profit organisation of PowerPC and alternative platforms enthusiasts is in the process of hardware testing our new “Powerboard Tyche”, a fully open hardware motherboard for a laptop based on a NXP T2080 which is a Book3e e6500 CPU (4 physical cores, 8 logical cores), see our recent blog post about it
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2022/12/prototypes-produced-lets-go-on-hardware-tests/
With such a board we hope to have a new small niche group of users of a PowerPC Book3e platform that will be more than happy to keep using QEMU with KVM enabled as using VMs without KVM is way too slow.
At the moment we still have a working NXP DevKit based on the same T2080 CPU and thank to a patch submitted back in December 2021 we can use QEMU with KVM enable on it.
The only issue we have so far is that it only starts when setting it as “e5500” (that does not have altivec) because starting it with e6500 (that has altivec) it does not start.
We published a blog post about QEMU with KVM enable back in December 2021, I made a screenshot with multiple QEMU instances
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2021/12/december-2021-updates-facing-electronic-components-shortages/
I am also aware of users of the A-Eon AmigaOne X5000 computers (still being produced and sold) that successfully use QEMU with KVM enabled, their system are based either on a NXP P5020 or P5040, both Book3e e5500, so without altivec.
So, again, please, do not remove KVM support to Book3e we need that!
Regards,
Mario