• New powerful m68k Debian porterbox available

    From Carsten Strotmann@21:1/5 to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz on Thu Nov 12 10:20:01 2020
    Hallo Adrian,

    John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes:

    Hi!

    I'm happy to announce that we are finally able to provide a
    porterbox for the
    m68k architecture which is available to every Debian Developer
    and everyone
    with a Debian guest account with the necessary permissions.

    The machine is called mitchy [1] (FQDN: mitchy.debian.net) and
    is named after
    the dog Mitchy of the creator of the Amiga, Jay Miner [2].

    The machine is based on a new QEMU m68k virtual machine type
    based on Google's
    Goldfish project [3] and supports up to 3.2 GB of RAM and up to
    128 virtual
    devices. With the host server currently in use, the emulated
    68040 is clocked
    at around 1 GHz which is enough to build and test most packages
    - although for
    building larger projects like GCC, it's advisable to use a
    faster host machine
    or QEMU user emulation.

    Hosting is kindly provided by Gandi.net [4] who have been
    providing cloud resources
    for Debian Ports to provide build machines for multiple
    architectures for a while
    now.

    The code has been developed by Laurent Vivier and consists of
    changes to both
    QEMU [5] and the Linux [6] which have not been upstreamed
    yet. Laurent will
    be giving a talk on the current status of this project and m68k
    emulation in
    QEMU in general during our next m68k online meeting on November,
    6th [7] where
    everyone is invited to join.

    Since the Goldfish-based m68k emulation support is rather new,
    the new porterbox
    may sometimes becomes unstable although that has improved a lot
    with the latest
    kernel patches by Laurent. There are also still some limitations
    in the FPU
    emulation support, so if you are seeing unexpected build
    failures or run into
    any other problems with the virtual machine, please let me
    know. I do have real
    m68k hardware available (which is much slower) to be able to run
    occasional tests
    on it.

    Thanks,
    Adrian

    [1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=mitchy
    [2]
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/3/
    [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwNjM
    [4] https://www.gandi.net
    [5] https://github.com/vivier/qemu-m68k/tree/m68k-virt
    [6] https://github.com/vivier/linux/tree/m68k-virt
    [7] http://m68k.info/

    Darf ich diese Meldung, ein wenig angepasst, auf die "Planet m68k"
    Seite
    posten?

    Beste Gruesse

    Carsten

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  • From Carsten Strotmann@21:1/5 to Carsten Strotmann on Thu Nov 12 10:20:01 2020
    Sorry, my last mail was not intended for the list. :-S

    On 12 Nov 2020, at 10:14, Carsten Strotmann wrote:

    Hallo Adrian,


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