[Morphix-devel] qemu, kqemu and Autotesting

[Brendan M. S. <me...@ba...>]

Hi All,

Since I now have a new Autotesting machine back on line.
   http://morphix.org/autobuilds/
   http://www.morphix.org/autobuilds/video/?C=M;O=D

In the AutoTesting logs I kept getting "Could not open '/dev/kqemu' -
QEMU acceleration layer not activated" So a little digging around.
   http://www.qemu.org/kqemu-doc.html
Please note that qemu is free, kqemu is non-free.

I already had non-free in my /etc/apt/sources.list:-
  deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free

With the following commands, (got to love sid):-
   sudo apt-get install kqemu-common kqemu-modules-2.6-686
   sudo modprobe kqemu

I then booted up a version of MorphixLiveKiosk I am debugging.
   sudo qemu -cdrom ./MorphixLiveKiosk.iso -boot d
Time to boot up to morphix home page in qmeu emulator (with kqemu):
   5min  7 Seconds
Without using kqemu:-
   sudo qemu -no-kqemu -cdrom ./MorphixLiveKiosk.iso -boot d
Time to boot up to morphix home page in qmeu emulator (w/o kqemu)
  12min 55 Seconds

I could not boot using the '-kernel-kqemu' option,  Using a
MorphixLiveCD inside the kqmeu is so much faster. If you do no mind
non-free I would heavily recommend kqmeu, it is very fast. NB these
boot-up times are running qemu on a PIII with just 256Mb of Ram.

I am going to set AutoTesting to _not_ use kqemu (-no-kqemu). The
AutoTesting videos are cron job sso no rush and reduces possible
emulations problems.
Also if AutoTesting is not using kqemu it keeps the non-heretics
happy, the video are produced using all free tools. Especially as the
videos are open, royalty-free multimedia format:-
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Technical_details

Regards,
Brendan