• [PATCH 1/8] build-system: clean up TCG/TCI configury

    From =?UTF-8?Q?Philippe_Mathieu-Daud=c3=@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jan 13 14:10:02 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    Cc'ing TCI, SH4 and PA contacts FWIW.

    On 1/7/21 5:06 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
    On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 04:50:36PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
    On 07/01/21 16:01, Peter Maydell wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 14:03, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote: >>>>
    Make CONFIG_TCG_INTERPRETER a Meson option, and enable TCI (though with >>>> a warning) if the host CPU is unsupported, making it more similar to
    other --enable-* options.

    The current behaviour is kind of deliberate. Using the TCG
    interpreter is a terrible idea and think it's better if we
    don't let users end up using it without realising that they have.
    (Personally I would vote to deprecate-and-delete TCI, and also
    to just have configure error out on unknown host CPU architectures.)

    Fair enough, I can change this back of course. The missing targets are
    parisc, ia64 and sh4 I guess.

    ia64 is a dead host architecture and doesn't exist in any OS distro that
    we target anymore, so I don't think we need to consider it.

    Likewise parisc/hppa doesn't seem exist in Debian since Squeeze, so I
    think we can rule that out too.

    Only sh4 still seems to be supported in Debian. I expect the primary
    need there is for sh4 guest support rather than sh4 host support.

    Regards,
    Daniel


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  • From John David Anglin@21:1/5 to Helge Deller on Wed Jan 13 15:10:01 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    On 2021-01-13 8:42 a.m., Helge Deller wrote:
    ia64 is a dead host architecture and doesn't exist in any OS distro that >>> we target anymore, so I don't think we need to consider it.
    I have no opinion about ia64.

    Likewise parisc/hppa doesn't seem exist in Debian since Squeeze, so I
    think we can rule that out too.
    Can we please keep parisc/hppa.
    It's not an official platform any longer, but quite active in the
    "unstable" debian-ports repository: https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=hppa&suite=sid

    Only sh4 still seems to be supported in Debian. I expect the primary
    need there is for sh4 guest support rather than sh4 host support.
    Same as for hppa/parisc, sh4 is in debian-ports too.
    The status of the platforms in debian-ports is here: https://www.ports.debian.org/archive https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=hppa&suite=sid

    There is some effort to maintain all the platforms in debian-ports.  The hppa platform is also still
    in gentoo, and one or two bsd distros.

    Regards,
    Dave

    --
    John David Anglin dave.anglin@bell.net

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  • From Daniel =?utf-8?B?UC4gQmVycmFuZ8Op?=@21:1/5 to Helge Deller on Wed Jan 13 15:50:02 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 02:42:51PM +0100, Helge Deller wrote:
    On 1/13/21 2:09 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
    Cc'ing TCI, SH4 and PA contacts FWIW.

    On 1/7/21 5:06 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
    On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 04:50:36PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
    On 07/01/21 16:01, Peter Maydell wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 14:03, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote: >>>>>
    Make CONFIG_TCG_INTERPRETER a Meson option, and enable TCI (though with >>>>> a warning) if the host CPU is unsupported, making it more similar to >>>>> other --enable-* options.

    The current behaviour is kind of deliberate. Using the TCG
    interpreter is a terrible idea and think it's better if we
    don't let users end up using it without realising that they have.
    (Personally I would vote to deprecate-and-delete TCI, and also
    to just have configure error out on unknown host CPU architectures.)

    Fair enough, I can change this back of course. The missing targets are >>> parisc, ia64 and sh4 I guess.

    ia64 is a dead host architecture and doesn't exist in any OS distro that >> we target anymore, so I don't think we need to consider it.

    I have no opinion about ia64.

    Likewise parisc/hppa doesn't seem exist in Debian since Squeeze, so I
    think we can rule that out too.

    Can we please keep parisc/hppa.
    It's not an official platform any longer, but quite active in the
    "unstable" debian-ports repository: https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=hppa&suite=sid

    Only sh4 still seems to be supported in Debian. I expect the primary
    need there is for sh4 guest support rather than sh4 host support.

    Same as for hppa/parisc, sh4 is in debian-ports too.

    So that at least shows that we need *guest target* support hppa/sha4.

    The question still remains whether anyone is actually likely to be running/using QEMU on a sh4/hppa *host*, to emulate a different
    guest arch ? This is what that TCG interpreter provides for.
    eg would anyone really want to emulate aarch64 guest when runing on
    a hppa host ?

    Regards,
    Daniel
    --
    |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|

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  • From John Paul Adrian Glaubitz@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jan 13 16:10:02 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    Hello!

    On 1/13/21 2:09 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
    ia64 is a dead host architecture and doesn't exist in any OS distro that
    we target anymore, so I don't think we need to consider it.

    Likewise parisc/hppa doesn't seem exist in Debian since Squeeze, so I
    think we can rule that out too.

    Both hppa and ia64 are maintained as unofficial ports in Debian:

    https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-01-03/

    Only sh4 still seems to be supported in Debian. I expect the primary
    need there is for sh4 guest support rather than sh4 host support.

    Same applies to sh4:

    https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-01-03/sh4/

    Adrian

    --
    .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
    `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
    `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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  • From Peter Maydell@21:1/5 to berrange@redhat.com on Wed Jan 13 15:40:03 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    On Wed, 13 Jan 2021 at 13:57, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
    The question still remains whether anyone is actually likely to be running/using QEMU on a sh4/hppa *host*, to emulate a different
    guest arch ? This is what that TCG interpreter provides for.
    eg would anyone really want to emulate aarch64 guest when runing on
    a hppa host ?

    If anybody does, they should provide and help us maintain
    an hppa backend for tcg (and resources so we can CI it).
    TCI is going to be so slow as to be useless -- you might
    be able to tick a box saying "we built QEMU for this port"
    but I find it hard to believe anybody would actually use
    the result.

    thanks
    -- PMM

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  • From Paolo Bonzini@21:1/5 to Helge Deller on Wed Jan 13 16:30:02 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    On 13/01/21 15:23, Helge Deller wrote:
    In debian many packages directly and indirectly depend on the qemu
    source package, because it provides - beside the emulator - various
    userspace tools which are necessary natively, like e.g. qemu-img.
    In the past building those tools failed on hppa because the configure script detected that neither native TCG nor TCG interpreter support was possible.
    As such the configuration aborted and no tools were built.
    So, the change should still make it possible to enable building the userspace tools.

    You could still build those, with --disable-system --disable-user. Or
    we could rig the configure/meson scripts to do that automatically if no accelerator is supported.

    Paolo

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  • From John Paul Adrian Glaubitz@21:1/5 to Helge Deller on Thu Jan 14 11:00:01 2021
    XPost: linux.debian.ports.superh

    Hello!

    On 1/13/21 3:23 PM, Helge Deller wrote:
    This is what that TCG interpreter provides for. eg would anyone
    really want to emulate aarch64 guest when runing on a hppa host ?

    In debian many packages directly and indirectly depend on the qemu
    source package, because it provides - beside the emulator - various
    userspace tools which are necessary natively, like e.g. qemu-img.

    I agree, that this a problem and it would be great if QEMU could be fixed
    that it builds on all targets, not necessarily with all features available.

    Currently, it looks like this:

    https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=qemu&suite=sid

    Note: The build failure on sparc64 is a bug in the device-tree-compiler
    package which has not been fixed in Debian yet, see:

    https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=977031

    In the past building those tools failed on hppa because the configure script detected that neither native TCG nor TCG interpreter support was possible.
    As such the configuration aborted and no tools were built.
    So, the change should still make it possible to enable building the userspace tools.

    I agree.

    On the other side, sometimes even a slow TCG-interpreter enabled qemu
    for other arches can be useful. It's not about speed, but about the *possibility* to emulate small pieces of different code, e.g. cross-compilers, bios-tools and such. It's not used often, but it
    can be handy.

    I also agree here.

    That said, if it doesn't hurt I think we should not disable something
    which can be useful (this applies to all architectures).

    True.

    Adrian

    --
    .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
    `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
    `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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