[virt-tools-list] Summary of patches needed to make virt work on aarch64

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Peter:

Here are the patches that I'm carrying on top of current Fedora
Rawhide that are needed to make virt thingamabobs work.

* qemu
  aarch64: Allow -kernel option to take a gzip-compressed kernel
  https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-08/threads.html#01786

Fully reviewed but not upstream yet.

This is required so that the -kernel option can read a standard
(gzipped) aarch64 kernel.

* kernel
  ,--
  | From 8f9ccea418065d59e43701cf7bbfc7410aaf12e4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
  | From: Don Dutile
  | Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 19:34:30 -0400
  | Subject: [PATCH] arm64: Change rtc-efi from module to always built-in
  `--

This patch is required so that we can use the kernel option
`efi-rtc=noprobe' to disable probing of the EFI RTC when EFI is not
available.  If the EFI RTC is probed in a VM it causes a kernel panic.

Currently this is not upstream.  I believe that Mark Salter is working
on a better, upstreamable version of this patch.

* kernel
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1123327

Make the dmesg buffer larger.  The current one is annoyingly small
even when trying to capture a simple stack trace.

* kernel
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1123882

Enables the PL031 RTC in VMs.  Justification is outlined in the BZ.
This is required for libguestfs, and is a good idea in general.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

As well as all that, there is the problem of lack of EFI support
inside virtual machines, and that's not apparently going to be solved
any time soon.  So see this thread:

  http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.virt-tools/8635

However it would be nice to have a lorax compose of Fedora 21/22 for
aarch64 even if it was broken at first.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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