On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 10:56:59PM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote: > > From: Stefan Fritsch <s...@sfritsch.de> > > Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 22:41:53 +0200 > > > > 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. > > Sounds like faithful emulation to me ;). >
IIRC there were problems with the rl(4)/re(4) watchdog timer not being implemented in qemu (or implemented in a way that is incompatible with OpenBSD), which caused a stream of "watchdog timeouts". I've switched to em(4) since about a year ago so I don't know if this is still a problem. -ml
