[virt-tools-list] Questions about virt-manager running on Arch of Itanium 64

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:05:08AM +0800, Dustin Xiong wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:16:05 +0000
> > From: berrange at redhat.com
> > To: crobinso at redhat.com
> > CC: x_k_123 at hotmail.com; libvirt-list at redhat.com; virt-tools-list at redhat.com
> > Subject: Re: [virt-tools-list] Questions about virt-manager running on Arch of	Itanium 64
> > 
> > On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:09:28AM -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
> > > On 11/23/2009 01:43 AM, Dustin Xiong wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > yes, my libvirt rpm and other related rpms all came from the RHEL 5.4
> > > > iso. And they all build for itanium 64
> > > > # rpm -qa | grep libvirt
> > > > libvirt-python-0.6.3-20.el5
> > > > libvirt-devel-0.6.3-20.el5
> > > > libvirt-0.6.3-20.el5
> > > > 
> > > > And i try to make a link, it still doesn't work.
> > > > ln -s /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-ia64 /usr/libexec/qemu-system-ia64
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Actually I think that destination needs to be /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm, not
> > > qemu-system-ia64. And looking at the rhel5 code, this can also be
> > > /usr/bin/qemu-kvm
> > 
> > 
> > That's not going to help.  'ia64' is not listed as a valid architecture
> > in qemu_conf.c, so it'll never be pulled into the capabilities, and thus
> > libvirt will never even look for a KVM binary
> > 
> 
> The libvirt and virt-manager rpm all come from the iso of 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Server (Itanium)Does the redhat have the 
> plans to implement the architecture ia64 in libvirt ?

libvirt as an open source project is happy to support any architecture.

In RHEL, Red Hat only support a sub-set of the functionality / platforms.
RHEL-5 Xen supports i386, x86_64 and ia64. RHEL-5 KVM only supports x86_64

> > Someone needs to update qemu_conf.c to handle ia64 correctly.
> > 
> 
> If i want to update qemu_conf.c to handle ia64 , which files or 
> datastruct needs to update ? Only the qemu_conf.c ?

If you search for the table  

   static const struct qemu_arch_info const arch_info_hvm[] = {

It is probably (hopefully?) sufficient to just add 

  {  "ia64",    64, NULL, "/usr/bin/qemu-system-ia64",    NULL, NULL, 0 },

The key test is that when you later run

   virsh capabilities

it should show the /usr/bin/qemu-system-ia64 binary, and also report that
KVM is present. 

I have a feeling you might also need to add code to the src/nodeinfo.c
file, since I think that /proc/cpuinfo on ia64 is in a different format
to that on x86_64. ie, change the linuxNodeInfoCPUPopulate() method so
it can also parse the ia64 format. This is used by the  command

  virsh nodeinfo


So once 'capabilities' and 'nodeinfo' are working on ia64,  then it should
be possible to use virt-manager properly

Daniel
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