[Info-vax] libvirt and emulation - (was: axpbox crashed when logged out.)

[Tomáš Glozar]

Dne pátek 20. listopadu 2020 v 15:06:56 UTC+1 uživatel John E. Malmberg napsal:
> Ideally any emulator would have a libvirt driver that can use it. 
> 
> The libvirt API provides an interface for third-party management tools 
> to control the system. 
> 
> It also provides its own GUI and command line tools for managing the 
> configuration of the emulated system. 
> 
> The fastest route to this is to get the libvirt-lxc driver fixed to 
> support privileged containers again. (Or risk running Ubuntu 14.04, etc.) 
> 

The only reason I can think of why the container has to be privileged is networking, and that could be solved using user mode networking like in QEMU.

> Even if the KVM driver is used, it would be a big plus if the emulator 
> could use the libvirt APIs to read its configuration files. 
> 
> This change makes the emulator immediately more useful in a cloud or 
> volume hosting environment. 
> 

That's a good point - I had the idea of creating a VirtualBox VM containing AXPbox inside, but integrating with libvirt sounds better considering the prevalent use of OpenVMS in server environments.

> I also noticed that the libvirt qemu emulator supports an Alpha 
> processor target. Has anyone tried to get OpenVMS running on such an 
> environment? 
> 

QEMU's Alpha target doesn't have a BIOS capable of booting, only a Linux-compatibile PALcode with something that I suppose is a dummy console (see https://www.ewan.cc/?q=node/127) - it's supposed to be booting directly into a Linux kernel. I attempted to run the ES40 SRM in QEMU some time ago (probably not a very good idea, since the hardware is likely different), doing some hacking of the source code, with no success, so I forked es40 instead for the first time (the result being a mess resulting in me dropping the fork and starting over again, from which came AXPbox). Nevertheless investigating what could be done to change this would certainly be interesting.