AMD64 qemu completely broken?

[Nate Eldredge]

On Sun, 7 Dec 2008, Juergen Lock wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 02:43:47PM -0800, Nate Eldredge wrote:
>> On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, Juergen Lock wrote:
>>
>>> I forgot to say the qemu-devel port (as well as the later snapshots I
>>> posted about on -emulation) also support -curses, which shows the emulated
>>> vga text(!)console on qemu's tty.  This works quite well with FreeBSD guests
>>> (even the isos) if you extend your xterm/whatever by one line (the default
>>> vga textconsole is 80x25 instead of 80x24.)
>>
>> As long as we're sharing tips about qemu:
>>
>> I've recently been working with qemu on amd64 and have set up a Debian etch
>> i386 guest which is working well.  I am using the qemu-devel and
>> kqemu-kmod-devel ports.  I am not using -kernel-kqemu at the moment; I
>> thought I would get things working before trying to speed up.
>>
>> Using qemu I've finally achieved my goal of being able to use flash on
>> FreeBSD/amd64 (in some sense :-O).
>>
> Actually at least on RELENG_7 and later the original www/linux-flashplugin9
> + www/nspluginwrapper don't work too bad at least for video sites these
> days (on 6 and 7.0 you need a patch and there it probably doesn't quite
> work on SMP because another patch concerning SMP can't be merged.)  See
> e.g. this thread on -emulation for more:
>        http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-emulation/2008-October/005433.html

Thanks for the pointer.  I will probably wait until 7.1 is out and ports 
are defrosted, so I can go straight to flash10 and not to have to do 
everything twice, but this information should be very helpful.

>>  '-net tap' works fine, but requires root privileges and
>> is more work to set up.
>>
> Actually it doesn't require root privs to run, only to setup.
> (Ok you _might_ need sudo to ifconfig the tap device and/or bridge
> in the qemu-ifup script...  But qemu itself can certainly run as user.)

Okay.  I was being lazy and letting qemu do some of that work for me.

>> [*] Out of curiosity, I looked at some Unix Archive stuff and found the
>> identical code in BSD's Net2, circa 1991.  It is identified in a comment as
>> a "quick hack" and adorned with several /* XXX */.  Naturally the code and
>> the comments survive intact, 17 years later. :-(
>>
> This might be somewhat more understandable if you know that the original
> slirp code was written many moons ago and only later resurrected for
> emulation purposes.  (It was originally invented for dialup users that
> logged into shellservers' gettys via serial modem lines so they could
> also use the box' inet connection locally before things like ppp were
> available...)

Yep, I think I remember trying to use some slip implementation over a 
serial modem once.  It's just unfortunate that qemu chose that code for 
their TCP/IP implementation rather than something else more modern.  Not 
that I'm volunteering to update it :)

-- 

Nate Eldredge
neldredge at math.ucsd.edu