[olpc-help] Emulation: QEMU savevm/loadvm commands to speed things up?

[mchua]

Forwarding a question from Feihong Hsu of OLPC Chicago:

"Hi, has anyone else gotten the savevm and loadvm commands to work inside QEMU? I find it annoying to wait 1.5 minutes for the QEMU image to boot up every single time."

For comparison (I've just timed these processes right now), from "hit button" to "main screen with XO-person in a circle and applications below":

4 min 39 sec: XO-on-qemu-on-Windows - latest build for everything, kqemu accelerator going, Mitra's automated script (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start/Windows) for starting up

1 min 41 sec: my XO (B4) running latest firmware and stable build

So... any tips on speeding up / making process less painful are very welcome.

Btw, good docs/hacks for emulation and running XO software on non-XO laptops will probably be in high demand from people who want to run pilots, etc. but are stuck with old computer labs or still waiting for their XOs.

Thanks,

-Mel