Re: Debian GNU/Hurd on qemu

[Marcus Brinkmann <marcus.brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

At Sun, 29 Feb 2004 05:35:44 +0100,
Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> many people ask how to run Debian GNU/Hurd on bochs.  Some people had
> success with this, while others had less luck.  Here is what I did to
> make it work.  Thanks to p2, weinholt, Jeroen and the other guys on
> IRC, who helped me out here and there.

If you are adventurous, you might like to try qemu.

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Everything works exactly as described for bochs (except you don't need
to setup bochs, of course, but you need the hdimage etc).

Then you run this:

$ qemu -m 128 -boot a -fda ~/.bochs/guest.fd0 -hda ~/.bochs/guest.hd0 -n /home/marcus/gnu/bochs/start-tun

Or if you installed grub on the hd image:

$ qemu -m 128 -hda ~/.bochs/guest.hd0 -n /home/marcus/gnu/bochs/start-tun

etc.  qemu is a LOT faster than bochs, and this makes a huge
difference (by orders of magnitude).  However, its emulation is not as
complete and exact as bochs.  Plus, it seems to be less stable (in
fact, it hangs quite often, and right now my mouse pointer is dead).
So, it's definitely less mature and much more experimental.  However,
the speed advantage can be worth to wreck your X server ;) It's a
no-brainer to try it out, there is no kernel patching or anything like
that involved, so give it a try.

Thanks,
Marcus