Last time I checked QEMU lacked support for >= z10 processors. Thus one cannot run SLE12 and newer in a virtual machine on non-s390x host. I'd like to improve the situation during Hackweeks.
This project is part of:
Hack Week 14 Hack Week 15 Hack Week 16
Activity
Comments
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almost 8 years ago by e_bischoff | Reply
I have submitted upstream a first patch to support the s/390 instructions LPD and LPDG (LOAD PAIR DISJOINT).
Unfortunately, these instructions are not needed for SLE12 to boot, but it was a way for me to learn how qemu works and to do a first contribution.
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almost 8 years ago by michal-m | Reply
I fixed the emulation of the STFL (STORE FACILITY LIST) instruction and implemented STFLE. So we now indicate the proper facility bits to the kernel. The next problem is that the kernel is trying to use the advertised facilities and crashes :-). Miroslav implemented the LPP (LOAD PROGRAM PARAMETER) instruction, which means that the kernel lives a bit longer. I'm now studying the s390x memory model and the qemu mmu code to implement the IDTE (INVALIDATE DAT TABLE ENTRY) instruction, which is what is needed to boot the kernel under z990 emulation. We all learned a lot about the architecture and about qemu internals, but the stated goal of booting the SLE12 kernel unmodified (means z196 emulation) is still a distant one.
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almost 7 years ago by mbenes | Reply
A lot has changed in qemu and upstream kernel since the last hackweek in Feb 2017. Lots of instructions were implemented in qemu and couple of facilities are supported. Maximum supported cpu model was changed from z900 to a stripped down z12 (this should get to qemu 2.12). At the same time, kernel's arch support was improved a lot. ALS (architecture level set) was rewritten from assembly to C code. Much more importantly a set of facilities required to run the kernel was reduced significantly. All this means that it is straightforward to run s390x upstream kernel on non-s390x host. SLE15 4.12 kernel contains all those important changes and thus we can run complete s390x SLE15 installation on non-s390x host.
I deem the hackweek project done. We can of course improve qemu implementation to support also SLE12 in the future, but I think it is not necessary.
Similar Projects
terraform-provider-feilong by e_bischoff
Project Description
People need to test operating systems and applications on s390 platform.
Installation from scratch solutions include:
- just deploy and provision manually (with the help of
ftpboot
script, if you are at SUSE) - use
s3270
terminal emulation (used byopenQA
people?) - use
LXC
from IBM to start CP commands and analyze the results - use
zPXE
to do some PXE-alike booting (used by theorthos
team?) - use
tessia
to install from scratch using autoyast - use
libvirt
for s390 to do some nested virtualization on some already deployed z/VM system - directly install a Linux kernel on a LPAR and use
kvm
+libvirt
from there
Deployment from image solutions include:
- use
ICIC
web interface (openstack
in disguise, contributed by IBM) - use
ICIC
from theopenstack
terraform
provider (used byRancher
QA) - use
zvm_ansible
to controlSMAPI
- connect directly to
SMAPI
low-level socket interface
IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center (ICIC
) harnesses the Feilong API, but you can use Feilong
without installing ICIC
, provided you set up a "z/VM cloud connector" into one of your VMs following this schema.
What about writing a terraform Feilong
provider, just like we have the terraform
libvirt
provider? That would allow to transparently call Feilong
from your main.tf files to deploy and destroy resources on your system/z.
Other Feilong-based solutions include:
- make
libvirt
Feilong-aware - simply call
Feilong
from shell scripts withcurl
- use
zvmconnector
client python library from Feilong - use
zthin
part of Feilong to directly commandSMAPI
.
Goal for Hackweek 23
My final goal is to be able to easily deploy and provision VMs automatically on a z/VM system, in a way that people might enjoy even outside of SUSE.
My technical preference is to write a terraform provider plugin, as it is the approach that involves the least software components for our deployments, while remaining clean, and compatible with our existing development infrastructure.
Goals for Hackweek 24
Feilong provider works and is used internally by SUSE Manager team. Let's push it forward!
Let's add support for fiberchannel disks and multipath.
Goals for Hackweek 25
- Finish support for fiberchannel disks and multipath
- Fix problems with registration on hashicorp providers registry