testing 8.2 using qemu

[Ton van Overbeek]

Gabriel Eirea wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I'm having a hard time trying to test an activity in 8.2 using qemu.
> The activity (Conozco Uruguay) doesn't work in 8.2 although it works
> fine in previous versions. We suspect it is related to rainbow (trac
> #8334). Since there is little documentation on rainbow (I still don't
> know what it is and why including it broke the activity) I'm going to
> follow a hack suggested by brian.
>
> The thing is, I can't make builds 759 nor 760 run using qemu. The
> configuration is fine because I can run build 659. In 759 it stops
> when saying "Booting from Hard Drive..." and in 760 it says that the
> kernel needs 3dnow. I downloaded the images from
>
> http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/xo-1/streams/8.2/
>
> Has anyone tested the images with qemu? Can anyone suggest how to
> proceed? I'm very interested in making my activity work in 8.2!
>   

There are/were two problems.
The first one (8.2 image not booting at all) has been solved
with 8.2-760.
The second one (3DNow required) is due to the change to the 2.6.25
kernel for 8.2. The kernel checks for CPU features and does not continue
booting when it does not find them. The kernel for the XO is build for
the AMD LX-Geode and therefore looks for 3DNow.
If you would run qemu on a machine with an AMD processor it most likely
will work. If you are running it on an Intel processor, you get the
"kernel needs 3dnow" message.
See also trac #8369 (http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8369).

In the CVS version of qemu you can specify a cpu type
(use -cpu=athlon for the XO) and then you can run 8.2 and recent joyride
devel-ext3 images in qemu on an Intel based machine.
I have a privately compiled version which runs under Windows XP
(have not tried it under Vista).
Let me know if you are interested in this one and I can send it to you.
If you are using Linux you will have to compile your own qemu.

There have been some efforts to get a qemu specific image not requiring
3DNow next to the existing ext3 images (since the existing ext3 images
have to be able to run on a real XO when booted from USB or SD) but so
far this has not been realized.

Hope this helps explain the situation.

Ton van Overbeek