We've had support for running s390x guests with KVM for a
while now. This patch set also enables support for running
s390x guests in system as well as linux-user mode in emulation!
Within this scope, I again want to stress that this is _not_
supposed to replace Hercules - the s390 emulator - in any way.
The only target supported by qemu is Linux. You can only run
Linux applications with linux-user emulation and Linux guest OSs
with the system emulation. All the device logic (and 24 bit mode)
for running legacy stuff is missing. Use Hercules for those!
I have successfully run the following guest OSs:
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1
- Debian Lenny
Both of which work just fine on x86_64 and ppc hosts. Other hosts
should also work. The only thing that did not work for me is network.
Somehow networking only works with KVM enabled, so there is probably
some bug involved still.
Either way - rejoice! As with this patch set you can finally fulfill
your mainframe desires on your local workstation. And - most importantly -
finally test patches to virtio against s390!
For images, I'm hoping for Aurelien to provide Debian images that run
in qemu. Other distributions only provide S390x target support in their
enterprise variants, keeping me from redistributing images :(.
If you're trying to get things rolling yourself, make sure to use a
recent kernel that has support for the virtio architecture and virtio
console support - otherwise you won't see output.
The linux user mode emulation part only support 64bit binaries, so
running Debian binaries with that one is out of question for now. Use
the system emulation mode if you really need to run Debian binaries.