[Université Paris Diderot, INRIA]

Pierre Letouzey

Emulateurs: Debian PPC via Qemu

TODO: Désolé, la traduction française reste à faire

If you're not coming from there, please check first my main emulation page, and in particular its DISCLAIMER section.

This page describes the emulation of a Debian PPC system using the Qemu emulator.

Qemu

I'm using Qemu 0.8.1:

apt-get install qemu

For the impatients

You can fetch my ready-to-run Debian PPC image:

debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.tar size:72MB
debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.md5
debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.md5.asc PGP sign of MD5

Then do typically:

md5sum -c debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.md5
gpg --recv 9E4A9C9D --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net
gpg --verify debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.md5.asc debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.md5
tar -xf debian-ppc-qemu-0.3.tar
cd debian-ppc-qemu-0.3
cat README
./run
And enjoy !

For building the image yourself

Well, do as I've done, follow the instructions of this very nice page.

Here are two direct links to the needed stuff:

If you take the time to install a proper virtual network (see here), then the networking configuration become straightforward (thanks to VDE+dhcpd). Instead of qemu-system-ppc, use the vdeq wrapper:

vdeq qemu-system-ppc -net nic,vlan=0 -net vde,vlan=0,sock=/var/run/vde/tap0.ctl ...

After the debian installation, I advise to install the openssh package and configure the server part. This way you will be able to reach your virtual machine from the real one, with is _really_ convenient: no more keyboard/mouse issues.

Limitations

The emulator takes 100% CPU even when the emulated machine is idle!

I haven't tried to install and run Xorg in the emulated machine. A console is enough for my needs (playing with gcc).