Topics

1

Applications and Porting / Better VGA in QEMU/KVM-HV/pSeries?

« on: January 11, 2022, 08:40:17 am »

Hello,

Inspired by the post from powerpc-notebook project, where they managed to bring KVM support into Linux kernel 5.16 for the Book3e NXP T2080 CPU, I tried to actually use the QEMU with KVM-HV on my Blackbird. It works well with the pseries machine type, I managed to install FreeBSD both ppc64 and ppc64le versions, but the problem is with the graphics. QEMU says that just std and virtio -vga values are supported and both types can do only 800x600, not more.

Does anyone use KVM-HV with better resolution and if so, then how?

Thanks.

2

Operating Systems and Porting / Gentoo

« on: February 05, 2021, 08:43:16 am »

I decided to try Gentoo on my Blackbird. It's been more than a decade since I actually used system built from sources, I'm kind of waiting whether bw42 will ever discover, why I'm not able to build kernel on my RiscySlack install and I have spare SATA SSD as RiscySlack is installed on the NVMe, so why not?

I wonder, did anyone successfully tried Gentoo?

And how did you install? I quicky discovered that it's not possible to install from the PPC64 ISO, because it's BE and if you want to have the system in LE, you will fail to chroot after installing the stage3 - /bin/bash is in incompatible format 

I'll try to do everything up to the chroot from RiscySlack, but I assume, that this can't be what Gentoo authors had in mind. Am I missing something?

3

Applications and Porting / QEMU accel=kvm not able to boot guest Mac OS X

« on: January 16, 2021, 06:09:26 am »

Hello everyone!

I wonder if anyone else ever had the same problem as I do: I'm not able to boot any Mac OS X version with KVM accelerator enabled.
More details:

Machine: 8-core Blackbird, 32G RAM
Kernel&host OS: right now 5.10.6 under Riscy Slack, but before that whatever was current in Void Linux during last months, kvm and kvm_pr both present and loaded
QEMU: 5.2.0, but also 4.1.1 and 5.0.0
Mac OS X: 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.5.2

What happens? MacOS X starts booting, after a while it reaches the point where it reports BSD root: disk0s3, major 14, minor 2 and hangs there. I discovered how to make qemu report errors, this is what happens:

Invalid access at addr 0x80000000, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000030, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000034, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000038, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x8000003C, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000040, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000044, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000048, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x8000004C, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
dbdma_unassigned_flush: use of unassigned channel 0
dbdma_unassigned_flush: use of unassigned channel 0
Invalid access at addr 0x80000038, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x8000003C, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000044, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000040, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
Invalid access at addr 0x80000040, size 4, region '(null)', reason: rejected
PMU: Unsupported READ_PMU_RAM, args: 80 02 03
PMU: Unsupported READ_PMU_RAM, args: 80 02 03
PMU: POWER EVENTS unknown subcommand 0x07
PMU: POWER EVENTS unknown subcommand 0x08

The commandline is: taskset -a -c 0-3 ./qemu-system-ppc -cpu nitro -M mac99,accel=kvm,via=pmu -m 512 -prom-env boot-args=-v -boot c -drive file=leopard.img,format=qcow2,l2-cache-size=4M -usb -device usb-tablet -g 1280x1024x32  -d unimp,guest_errors

The tcg accelerator works, I installed the system from DVD through it as with KVM not even that boots. Thanks for any advice!