On Tuesday 09 September 2014 21:27:37, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote: > > Could the PCI virtio stuff be adapted to non-x86 architectures? > > QEMU already has a virtio PCI device that can be plugged into > qemu-system-sparc64 (see Artyom's blog at > http://tyom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/debiansparc64-wheezy-under-qemu-h > ow-to.html for an example of how to do this with Linux). > > This could be an amusing project; in theory it would be possible to > work on an x86 laptop to test/debug big-endian virtio support with > the help of QEMU's virtual hardware. You can do this by plugging > in a standard virtual cdrom/hd along with an additional virtio > hd/nic, booting from the standard devices and then testing the > drivers accessing the extra devices as required.
>From the openbsd side, virtio should work with sparc. But since nobody has tested it on big endian so far, there will be bugs. And it needs to be enabled in the config, of course. If you look at generic PCI network adapters, I would recommend trying e1000 if possible. Last time I tried it (on x86), qemu's rtl8139 emulation did not work with openbsd's driver, and I think there were some problems with the ne2k emulation, too. Or maybe ne2k just had terrible performance. Cheers, Stefan
