[pve-devel] Enabling mips/mipsel support in Hypervisor

[Fabian Grünbichler]

On July 24, 2020 2:23 am, Skyler Mäntysaari wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I would like to ask how can I get mips/mipsel arch qemu working on Proxmox?

quoting my own post in the forum thread you linked ;)

> we only build the amd64 emulation, and install qemu-system-amd64 as 
> "kvm" binary. so no, this does not work unless you manually re-build 
> our pve-qemu-kvm packages with more architecture support and adapt the 
> perl scripts to use the appropriate qemu-system-XXX binary.


> This 
> <https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/emulating-non-x86-machine-types.35801/> 
> forum post, seems to indicate it should be rather simple, but why was it 
> disabled to begin with?

because for it to make sense we need to implement and maintain the full 
machine model, which is quite a lot of work for x86 already. all the 
other arches are rather niche, so the cost of implementation and 
maintenance is rather high.

> # apt install qemu-system-mipsel
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> Note, selecting 'qemu-system-mips' instead of 'qemu-system-mipsel'
> Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
> requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
> distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
> or been moved out of Incoming.
> The following information may help to resolve the situation:
> 
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   qemu-system-mips : Depends: qemu-system-common (> 1:2.12~) but it is 
> not going to be installed
> E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
> 
> and
> 
> Get:1 http://security.debian.org buster/updates/main amd64 
> qemu-system-common amd64 1:3.1+dfsg-8+deb10u6 [989 kB]
> Fetched 989 kB in 0s (5,040 kB/s)
> W: (pve-apt-hook) !! WARNING !!
> W: (pve-apt-hook) You are attempting to remove the meta-package 
> 'proxmox-ve'!
> W: (pve-apt-hook)
> W: (pve-apt-hook) If you really want to permanently remove 'proxmox-ve' 
> from your system, run the following command
> W: (pve-apt-hook)       touch '/please-remove-proxmox-ve'
> W: (pve-apt-hook) run apt purge proxmox-ve to remove the meta-package
> W: (pve-apt-hook) and repeat your apt invocation.
> W: (pve-apt-hook)
> W: (pve-apt-hook) If you are unsure why 'proxmox-ve' would be removed, 
> please verify
> W: (pve-apt-hook)       - your APT repository settings
> W: (pve-apt-hook)       - that you are using 'apt full-upgrade' to 
> upgrade your system
> E: Sub-process /usr/share/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook returned an error code (1)
> E: Failure running script /usr/share/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook

the above attempts to install the stock qemu package from Debian Buster, 
which is not compatible with our stack and Qemu packages..