Bug#977126: linux: No armel kernel can be booted by grub-efi-arm:armel
Hi Ben, thanks again for your response.
> We used to provide a 'versatile' flavour on armel, for the ARM
> Versatile boards that QEMU has supported for a long time. I removed
> this flavour back in 2016 after finding that it had been broken for a
> while and no-one had reported it. Adding that back might be an option,
> if the Raspberry Pi device emulation in QEMU is slow. What do you
> think?
If nobody uses linux-image-versatile now, I don't want to request the
kernel team to revive it. It may/might increase the maintainance effort...
The minimum requirements by autopkgtest-virt-qemu are
* VM has at least two serial ports,
* the Linux kernel has a driver for them, and
* the Linux kernel has a driver for a storage attached to the VM.
On the other hand, RPi series has only one serial port by PL011.
So we need to attach another serial port to the VM. For armhf, arm64,
and ppc64el, I was advised to use virtconsole by Simon McVittie,
and it has worked fine as far as I see.
But linux-image-rpi does not have the virtio driver, this option cannot
be used (at least for now). Another option is to attach "pci-serial-2x"
to the qemu VM, but linux-image-rpi does not seem to have a PCI driver...
Yet another option is to attach "qemu-xhci" and "usb-serial" to the VM,
but "usb-serial" behaves much differently from isa/pci-serial and virtconsole
and it cannot be used by the current autopkgtest-virt-qemu as reported at
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=973038#40
> The usual practice is to use u-boot or some other board-specific boot
> loader, which can be configured by the flash-kernel package. I don't
> think that works in QEMU.
I have not intensively investigated if we can boot linux-image-marvell
by qemu-system-arm and some u-boot Debian package...
I will see it within several days and report it back here.
First I will see u-boot-qemu Debian package and the qemu "virt" machine
can boot linux-image-marvell as suggested at
https://github.com/ARM-software/u-boot/blob/master/doc/README.qemu-arm
linux-image-marvell seems capable of handling PCI serial ports.
Storage options for QEMU VM seems only "ich9-ahci" and "sdhci-pci"...
Best regards, Ryutaroh
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