1121375 - Support non-ARM guest systems on Emulator

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Emulator, defect)

Description

[Thomas Zimmermann [:tzimmermann] [:tdz]]

Our current emulator only runs ARM-based guest systems. We want to support more architectures, especially x86. If host and guest use the same architecture, emulation speed might increase.

TODO:

  - get all packages compiled
  - support all devices in the guest kernel

Comment 1

[Thomas Zimmermann [:tzimmermann] [:tdz]]

I was able to build and run emulator-x86-kk with today's branches. If no HW support for virtualization is available, the emulator will run just as slow as before. It took minutes to boot the guest system.

I switched on KVM (by installing qemu-kvm on Debian). KVM is the Linux driver for HW-based virtualization. It's available if you see '/dev/kvm' on your host machine. With KVM available, Qemu runs with near-native performance. Booting the guest system takes a few seconds, the display updates are fast, the overall system is very much usable.

HW-based emulation looks like the way forward for improved performance and faster automated testing.

Comment 2

[Josh Cheng [:josh]]

Dear Thomas,
The result looks good. Will you help to integrate all required manifests and packages?
Thanks!

Comment 3

[Thomas Zimmermann [:tzimmermann] [:tdz]]

Hi,

Bug 1124567 finally landed, so I wanted to take a look at bug 1090359 about getting emulator-kk running.

The x86 emulator (this bug) only makes sense if the hardware supports virtualization. I heard that our test machines have rather weak hardware, so I don't expect x86 emulation to make a big difference. I'd look closer into it after bug 1090359 is ready.

Comment 4

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

If nothing else, it would be nice to be able to use `./mach mochitest` with hardware-virtualized x86 emulators locally, to reproduce test failures that aren't architecture-dependent.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on