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QEMU for ARM and PPC (was: Re: Upcoming Virtualbox IRC classroom session (has a wiki page) )

 

Lars,

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013, at 01:44 AM, Lars Noodén wrote:

> VirtualBox is rather easy to use and a little too wide spread.  What
> needs some love is Qemu so that more people can start working with ARM
> and PPC.

I have used QEMU too, but that wasn't the topic I was invited to do a
class on :)

I have a web page (a bit old now) about some work I did on QEMU
emulating ARM and building some packages on that, at

  http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/balsa-on-arm

which includes a scripted approach to setting up QEMU for ARM on a
Ubuntu or Lubuntu base OS.  If there is enough interest, I'd happily
update that for current Ubuntu versions and give a class on it.  But
when Raspberry Pi is $35, most people needing something to play with ARM
on just buy a Pi instead of using QEMU, these days... but Ubuntu chose
not to support ARMv6 CPUs, so we can't use that for Ubuntu on ARM
testing, sadly.  For that you need a $250 Chromebook or a $200 Nextus 7.

Does QEMU have an "armhf" (ARM v7 with hardware floating point)
emulation mode now?  I don't think it did back when I worked on
that stuff.

I am not convinced using QEMU for PPC would help a lot, given many of
the issues we are seeing seem to be related to specific hardware (video
cards, sound cards, NICs) on older Apple machines.  Do you think it
would really be useful to do ISO install testing of Lubuntu PPC on a
QEMU PPC emulated machine?

Jonathan
-- 
  Jonathan Marsden
  jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx



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