[Qemu-devel] qemu-ppc (prep) crashes with NetBSD guest

[Felix Deichmann]

Hi,

I tried to install NetBSD/prep 6.1 in qemu-ppc (-M prep), but qemu
crashes during installation with "floating point exception" in a
reproducible way.

qemu is version 1.5.2-1 from Arch Linux (sorry, didn't have the time
to build a current one) on a x86_64 host. The same happens with Win
qemu 1.5.1 binaries from http://lassauge.free.fr/qemu/.
I boot a custom NetBSD installation image ("sysinst_com0.fs") via the
"-kernel" option, and use a serial console (VGA doesn't work for me).
The custom image contains a kernel which does not use NetBSD's pnpbus
for prep, but hardwired device configuration like ISA IDE
controller's, as qemu seems to miss PnP information found on real PReP
machines completely?

# qemu-system-ppc -nographic -M prep -m 128M -hda hda.qcow2 -cdrom
NetBSD-6.1-prep.iso -serial ... -kernel sysinst_com0.fs

There seems to be a connection between the amount of RAM chosen and
the point where the crash happens. With 128M, qemu will crash when the
installer extracts some of the earlier packages, with 256M the crash
will happen later when extracting. Each one is reproducible at the
exact point of installation. And the amount of bytes extracted could
be the amount of RAM minus some number.
(64M and >256MB won't boot at all, so I could not finish installation...)

The boot image I used can be found at:
http://www.flxd.de/netbsd/qemu-ppc/sysinst_com0.fs

The ISO is the standard one from NetBSD.

Would be great if someone (also with a current qemu) could have a
look, as I did not even manage to get a core file...

Thanks
Felix