Re: Missing rebuild packages?

[Chris Hanson <cmhanson%eschatologist.net@localhost>]

On Apr 6, 2020, at 9:04 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz%physik.fu-berlin.de@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps we can nudge Jason to see if he'd be willing to look at NetBSD/m68k in qemu... ;)
> 
> Would definitely be cool if we could get this going. Someone already actually
> tried this but ran into issues, but that was two years ago [1].
> 
> Adrian
> 
>> [1] https://github.com/vivier/qemu-m68k/issues/29

Something that occurred to me is that it might be useful to build a "virtual" platform that has a minimum set of peripherals (memory, console UART, PCI controller, VirtIO networking, VirtIO SCSI) that can be used with pretty much any CPU.

That would make it straightforward to create a build of NetBSD for each "slow" architecture that could be run in a fast emulator to do things like builds, debug compilers, debug the kernel itself (for things other than drivers), etc.

So for m68k, you could configure QEMU emulating m68k with the above peripherals plus 2GB of RAM, boot a few instances running NetBSD (which will probably be easier than getting QEMU Quadra 800 emulation working enough to boot NetBSD), and then start building.

And then do the same for (say) sh3el, earm, mips, and so on.

  -- Chris