Re: QEMU-KVM offers OPAL firmware interface? OpenBSD guest support?

[Cédric Le Goater]

On 8/29/21 6:20 AM, Joseph wrote:
>> runs Linux powernv bare metal on Power9 hardware. Each VM is a
>> KVM-QEMU instance.
> 
>>>> If you want to also run OpenBSD inside a VM, then OpenBSD must
>>>> implement proper support to be able to run in the paravirtualized
>>>> PAPR environment provided by KVM-QEMU on POWER. The OpenBSD statement
>>>> seem to indicate this is missing. Nothing special "should" be needed
>>>> on the KVM-QEMU side.
> 
> Terminology, what is PAPR an abbreviation of

Power Architecture Platform Reference

https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/LoPAR-20200611.pdf

> is pseries (hardware interface) equivalent with PAPR?

pseries was the name of IBM powerpc servers. It is the name of the Linux 
platform supporting PAPR and also the name of the QEMU machine implementing 
PAPR.

> Also all discussed above is supported by Raptor Talos/Blackbird
> hardware right - the Raptor machine exports PowerNV to the host system
> that runs on bare metal, and the host system (= Linux QEMU-KVM for
> now) will export a virtualized pseries/papr Power9 machine to the VM
> guest, which runs at close to full bare metal speed?

yes. There is a slight overhead depending on how much the hypervisor needs
to be involved.  
 
C.