PPC64 virtual machine

[Josh Boyer]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:30:32AM -0700, Jerry James wrote:
>I've gotten GCL to build successfully in Rawhide on i386 and x86_64
>platforms.  However, it segfaulted on PPC64.
>
>http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1043890
>
>Before I ExcludeArch the ppc platforms, I would like to try to
>diagnose the problem.  My first thought was to create a virtual PPC64
>machine.  So I downloaded the latest Rawhide boot.iso and fired up
>virt-manager.  After configuring the machine, attempting to boot
>produces this output on the console:
>
>  PPC Open Hack'Ware BIOS for qemu version 0.4.1
>  Build 2007-10-01 06:42:47
>  Copyright 2003-2005 Jocelyn Mayer
>
>  Memory size: 1024 MB.
>  Booting from device d
>  PPC Open Hack'Ware BIOS for qemu version 0.4.1
>  Build 2007-10-01 06:42:47
>  Copyright 2003-2005 Jocelyn Mayer
>
>  ide0: drive 0: Hard Disk
>  ERROR: OF_property_copy cannot get property 'hd' for aliases
>  ide0: drive 1: CD-ROM
>  ERROR: OF_property_copy cannot get property 'cd' for aliases
>  ERROR: ATAPI TEST_UNIT_READY : status 41 != 0x40
>  ide1: drive 0: none
>  ide1: drive 1: none
>  ERROR: Found no boot partition!
>
>Google shows a lot of people complaining about the same problem, but
>no solutions; e.g.:

ppc and qemu in general don't get along at the moment.  Also, if you were
looking for hardware assisted virt, you'd need an LPAR which is only available
on the big server boxes.  (Or want to be running on a PPC 440 embedded board,
but that is a tangent).

You can get access to a machine though.  There are those in the community that
have Fedora PPC64 machines you can ssh into if you give them an ssh public
key.  David Woodhouse, Kevin Fenzi, and myself are among them.

josh