Re: [Qemu-devel] SunOS support

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 5:10 PM, Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
wrote:

> On 22 September 2017 at 16:51, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 22/09/2017 14:05, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> On 20 September 2017 at 19:50, Peter Tribble <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> >>> To introduce myself: I'm a member of the illumos community (the
> successor
> >>> to OpenSolaris, to those unfamiliar with us), and I maintain my own
> illumos
> >>> distribution.
> >>>
> >>> Having seen the scary 'SUPPORT FOR THIS HOST OS WILL GO AWAY'
> >>> message, I'm reaching out to see what needs to be done so that support
> for
> >>> SunOS (not just illumos, I include Oracle's Solaris in the same family)
> >>> needs to be kept and, where possible, enhanced.
> >>>
> >>> I'm willing to act as a contact in this effort, and can work with
> others in
> >>> the illumos community to see if there are other resources we can bring
> to bear.
> >>
> >> Hi; thanks for getting in touch with us. Kamil Rytarowski (who I've
> >> cc'd) is also interested in keeping Solaris-variant support working.
> >>
> >> Essentially what we need as upstream is:
> >>  * access to a machine which we can use for our continuous
> >>    integration build testing, so we don't break compile
> >>    support for the platform. This is ideally a machine that
> >>    somebody else admins and we just use (because we don't
> >>    want to become solaris/illumos admins ;-)), but failing
> >>    that, instructions on how to get a VM running under
> >>    KVM on Linux would also be OK (that's how we've ended
> >>    up handling the BSDs)
> >
> > I would even reverse the order since now we're handling the BSDs using
> > the VM test infrastructure.  Let's say having both would be best.
>
> I only have the one beefy machine to run VMs on, so the more
> OSes we handle via VMs the more overloaded it gets. Also,
> everything we have as a VM is another thing I have to maintain
> and presumably update from time to time...
>

Well, we have options.

Tribblix (http://www.tribblix.org/) is probably the easiest and lightest for
a VM. Works fine under KVM (not virtio-scsi, and I've had issues with
virtio networking). Just download the iso, install with

./live_install -B c1t0d0 kitchen-sink qemu

and you're good to go. (That's assuming you have network connectivity
during install, and I'm guessing at the probable disk device. Adding qemu
ought to grab all the dependencies.)

It's not too hard to give access to a running machine, although I
personally don't have any available right now (I could run one up
on AWS). Or the good folks at Joyent might be able to help out - I
can certainly ask them.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/