Running mipsel guest under libvirt/qemu

Christoph Biedl <[email protected]> Mon, 5 Jun 2017 13:10:45 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.mips
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello,

in a desperate attempt to understand #852962, thus salvaging ycmd and
youcompleteme for stretch, I tried to set up an emulated mipsel machine
using libvirt/qemu, and failed horribly. There are tons of documents
out there, many years old, contradicting, not helping.

So: Is this feasible at all? I could use a pointer then.

So far: Create a virtual machine, with installer CD and virtual disk.
Then libvirt needs a patch by Aurilien[1][2]. Then libvirt complains
about mips_bios.bin although some pages[3]  state this was no
longer required. Providing a dummy image, the machine starts, but shows
just a blank screen and qemu eats 100% CPU. Then booting via "Direct
kernel boot", ditto. I've tried several "console=" parameters, no
avail. Perhaps libvirt plays tricks on me, wasn't the first time.

It *is* possible to start qemu-system-mipsel directly, with an
additional '-serial stdio' parameter, but for reasons I'd really like to
control the machine using libvirt, and I fail to see how to fiddle the
kernel console into the libvirt terminal.

- What did I miss?
- How comes appearently nobody encounters such issues?

    Christoph

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2016-May/msg00197.html
[2] Which for whatever reason this did not make it into stretch
[3] https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/QEMU#MIPS_BIOS_not_found_on_startup

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