Re: Test environment for non-native archs

[Richard Pennington <rich@pennware.com>]

On Saturday, May 26, 2012 11:18:40 PM Rich Felker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been thinking a bit about further testing of ARM (for which I
> don't have a native environment) and ports to other systems, and
> realized that to be able to efficiently mix working on the native host
> and virtual target system (e.g. doing most of the compiling on the
> host), it's going to be desirable to have the Linux running under qemu
> using part of the host's filesystem as its root fs, instead of having
> a filesystem image.
> 
> This seems to be possible with qemu's support for exporting a virtual
> 9p share to the guest OS, but I haven't yet determined if it's
> possible to boot directly with the 9p share as the root fs, or whether
> it's going to require a separate initial fs image and switch/pivot
> root afterwards (as you can tell, I'm not very familiar with this sort
> of setup).
> 
> Anyone know the answer, or have some recipes I could use?
> 
> Rich

Hi Rich,

For my testing (which musl for ARM just passed, by the way ;-), I mostly use 
QEMU in Linux user space emulation mode. I just compile an executable on my 
x86 system and run it:
	qemu-arm a.out arg1 arg2 ...

In fact, my system is configured to recognize an arm executable and run qemu-
arm automatically, which is kind of slick.

When I do run a full blown system VM, I just nfs mount directories on my main 
system that I'm interested in.

-Rich