Re: qemu-system-sparc stays "parked"?

On Fri, Apr 24, 2026 at 4:32 PM John D. Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Not sure where to put this, so "netbsd-users@" seems like a good starting
> point.
>
> I usually build packages for sparc natively, but only during cold-weather
> months when the electric bills are lower and the added heat from the
> machines is welcome.
>
> With NetBSD-11 nearing release, I wanted to set up building with a
> 'qemu-system-sparc' guest since my build host is always on and has plenty
> of RAM and processor capacity.  (I tried the pkgsrc cross-building setup
> once, but it screwed up my host packages in the process.)
>
> The host is NetBSD/amd64-10.1_STABLE w/12GB RAM and a quad-core processor.
> The disk image for the guest is qcow2.  I tried installing with "-machine
> SS-20", but it would hang during the "running MAKEDEV" stage.  Installing
> as the default SS-5 had no problem.  I would then shut the guest down
> and restart it with "-machine SS-20 -cpu TI-SuperSparc-61 -m 2048" (I
> wanted to use "-smp 4", but anything other than uniprocessor would hang
> after "waiting 2 seconds for SCSI busses to settle".
>
> So, single-processor SS-20 with max RAM it is.

I used something between 256 and 512 mb ram for qemu-system-sparc guest ...

Then I added second disk and set it up in guest as swap.


 I eventually worked out
> how to get NFS working (export host-resident filesystems to 127/8 w/
> "-noresvport -noresvmnt" and add those flags on the file server to
> exports to the host machine).  I am using "-nic user,..." if that has
> some bearing on the issue.
>
> When I set about to build the first package, the guest went down about
> 3 levels of dependency and just sat there.  'top' on the host shows it
> in "parked" state, occasionally moving from one CPU to another.  Pressing
> ctrl-T in the guest elicits the expected output, but it never (seems to)
> progress.
>
> Any suggestions about what's going on?
>
> Anyone else using 'qemu-system-foo' to build packages for your RAM or
> CPU-limited "foo" systems?  With pkgsrc tree on NFS?  Tips?  Tricks?
> Techniques?
>
> --
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