I manage a large farm of hundreds of VMs for various O/Ses and CPU
architectures that we use for software testing of numerous GNU and
other open source projects, and for the annual TeX Live releases, such
as documented here:
https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/
Among the VMs are numerous ones running Debian versions 5 to 13 on
alpha, amd64 (x86_64), arm64, hppa, loong64, m68k, mips32, mips64,
ppc64le, s390x, and sparc64.
When Debian 12.8 was announced in early November, I readily created a
new VM for it for qemu-system-mips32el. However, a similar installer
script for qemu-system-mips64el was not successful.
I have made numerous attempts on four independent physical machines
running CentOS 7, Ubuntu 22, and Ubuntu 24, with both
distribution-provided, and locally built-from-source, QEMU
installations from versionss 2.0.0 to 9.2.0-rc1, plus a git-tree
snapshot of 23-Nov-2024 that identifies itself as version 9.1.91.
As an independent check, I also tried MIPS64el installations from ISO
images for Debian versions 7 to 11: they were successful, but versions
7 to 10 are useless to me because apt-get cannot find package
repositories, making it impossible to install the scores of packages
that I need for software development in various programming languages.
In every attempt on every physical host and QEMU version for Debian
12.8 on MIPS64el, the VM starts up, the text-mode installer proceeds
in its familiar way past account and network setup, begins to install
packages, and then, depending on the O/S / QEMU-version / physical
host combination, reaches either 75% or 79% completion in its
red-on-blue progress bar, then reports "CPU stuck" errors. I have
even left some of the VMs running for a day or more at that point, but
none ever made further progress.
The installer script has this typical fragment:
QEMU=`which qemu-system-mips64el`
$QEMU
\
-machine malta
\
-cpu 5KEc
\
-m 2G
\
-nographic
\
-kernel vmlinuz-6.1.0-27-4kc-malta
\
-initrd initrd-malta.gz
\
-drive if=none,file=debian-12-8-mips64el.qcow2,format=qcow2,id=hd
\
-device virtio-blk-pci,drive=hd
\
-drive
file=/local/iso/debian-12.8.0-mipsel-netinst.iso,format=raw,media=cdrom \
-netdev user,id=qemunet
\
-device virtio-net-pci,netdev=qemunet
\
-append "console=ttyS0"
The .qcow2 file is an 80GB one. The PATH changes with experiments,
which is why $QEMU is set to the full pathname, so that I can tell
from a "ps auxww" or "top" display which version of QEMU is in use.
I have tried different -cpu options, such as 5KEf, without getting a
successful installation.
I also tried different ISO images
-r--r--r-- 1 4616241152 Nov 9 07:29 debian-12.8.0-mips64el-DVD-1.iso
-r--r--r-- 1 4694515712 Nov 9 07:22 debian-12.8.0-mipsel-DVD-1.iso
-r--r--r-- 1 535429120 Nov 9 07:21 debian-12.8.0-mipsel-netinst.iso
but all had the same installer hangs.
The top of the installer window has options to switch views, but
despite attempts with Ctl, Ctl-Alt, Alt-, and ESC prefixes on 1, 2, 3
and 4, I cannot leave view 1 (installer) to get to view 4 for the
installation log: it is held in a memory filesystem that is lost when
the hung VM is eventually killed (by C-a C to reach the (qemu) prompt,
the q to quit).
My questions for this group are:
(1) Have any of you succeeded for Debian 12.8 on MIPS64el
emulated by QEMU?
(2) If so, what is your recipe for the installation command?
(3) If not, did you see the 75%--79% completion, then a hang?
(4) What is the magic keyboard sequence for switching to
others of the 4 offered views in the installer window?
(5) Is it possible to capture the installer log on the
underlying filesystem, in the hope that is might give
clues about the hang?
(6) Is there an alternate source of package repositories for
Debian versions before 11?
Thanks in advance for your experience, ideas, insight, and
suggestions.
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- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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