[Aboriginal] [PATCH] Move i586 to virtio

[Alessio Igor Bogani]

Hi,

2011/6/22 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net>:
[...]
> 2) Not all deployed versions of qemu/kvm support this yet. (Actually,
> last I checked you still had to build qemu from the -git tree to get
> this, _and_ you had to install some obscure ACL support package without
> which configure would silently disable it without explanation.  If the
> i586 target is unconditionally switched to virtio without some kind of
> config knob, this effectively _disables_ it for people using qemu/kvm
> from ubuntu 10.04 LTS.  They ship a new LTS in October which might
> support it, but it's not there yet...)

I don't understand: The i586 modified version works on my 10.04.02 system
What are the problems are you talking about?

> 3) It doesn't work on anything _except_ an x86 target; there's no virtio
> for arm or mips that I've found.  That means turning on autoconf is an
> optimization for x86, the one platform on which you can just use chroot
> if you really need performance.

I need performance when I test kernels which differs from the one used
by my host. So I can't use chroot nor (unfortunately) LXC.

AFAIK ia64, mips, powerpc, s390, sh, tile and x86 should support VIRTIO devices.

Obviously KVM kernel config options works on x86 only.

[...]
> You switch on VIRTIO_CONSOLE but don't use it?

Yeah because at the moment I don't know how make it works!

[...]
> Lemme work on fixing the hw-target support this weekend (migrating it to
> a new less intrusive mechanism, actually) and then we can add this as a
> new i586-virtio target.  Then if enough stuff grows virtio options we
> can collapse it back into the base in a future release.  Sound reasonable?

Yes definitely.

I tried creating the i586-virtio target but binutils refused to build
so I made the changes in place.

Thanks!

Ciao,
Alessio