[Qemu-devel] Status of using QEMU in openSUSE Buildservice

[Martin Mohring]

Hi,

i have got some happy news for you: we have been successfully using qemu
user mode on ARM to implemente ARM support in the openSUSE Buildservice
(OBS), located on build.opensuse.org.

I am one of the "non novell" developers of the project, and I am also
the maintainer of the developer packages, which are build in regular
snapshots from the svn trunc and tested. OBS is developed in an open
fashion, with on open subversion repo, licensed under the GPLv2.

OBS is addressing application developers that want to package and
distribute OSS applications for all kind of linux distributions.
Currently, we support:

SUSE
  openSUSE 11.1 (is build itself with OBS from beta 4 stage on, will be
released with OBS)
  openSUSE 11.0
  openSUSE 10.3
  openSUSE 10.2
  SUSE Linux 10.1
  SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
  SUSE Linux Enterprise 9
  openSUSE Factory
Debian
 Debian Etch
 Red Hat
 Fedora 9
 Fedora 8
 Fedora 7
 Fedora 6 + Extras
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
 CentOS 5
Mandriva Linux
 Mandriva 2008
 Mandriva 2007
 Mandriva 2006
Ubuntu (Includes Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.)
 Ubuntu 8.04
 Ubuntu 7.10
 Ubuntu 7.04
 Ubuntu 6.06

It is merely a problem of Disk space, an not of the technique, how many
of the we put inside the public OBS (and of course work to manage
updates to this list, it is currently for i586, x86_64 and
powerpc/powerpc64). Since OBS is GPL code, you are free to set up an own
system if you are not happy with the provided base distros, or you can
ask us to add another Distro of you choice.

OBS itself is technically able to build also complete linux
distributions, and can even produce bootable media in its backend, and
can generate ftp trees for the download managers of the above said linux
distributions. It is also able to work only on the basis of the released
binary packages if you whish, can generate its internal meta data just
from the binary packages and the delivered meta data files in the ftp
trees of a distribution (both rpmmd and deb type are working).

Now back to ARM: we have been successfully using current QEMU svn
snapshots up to svn trunc -r 5728 (using ARM user mode emulation for
performance reasons) to run builds for all kinds of available ARM based
distros. I have also added the SYSV IPC patches of Kirill A. Shutemov to
our QEMU Package so certain programs in debian (like the buildsystem,
especially "fakeroot") can work. Here is a list of distros that are
working with this approach:

Debian
  Debian Etch  @ arm4l
  Debian Lenny @ arm4l, arm5el
  Debian Sid   @ arm4l, arm5el
Fedora (as provided by Fedora on the Linux UK ftp server)
  Fedora 8     @ arm5el
Ubuntu (as ported by the Mojo Project - there seems to be an official
arm port with one of the next ubuntu releases)
  Ubuntu 7.10  @ arm5el

Other archs seem not to be in that good shape in the user mode
emulation, so qemu can currently not be used in our OBS. Paul Brooks and
others warned me about that in forward, so at least I knew it. They told
me that missing ntpl/futex stuff is the reason for that, so newer glibc
cannot work correctly.

Martin Mohring

Maintainer OBS / opensuse.org