Fedora 11 s390x emulator

[David Smith <dsmith@redhat.com>]

Back on 6/18, Karsten Hopp posted the following message to
fedora-devel-list:

<https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-June/msg01635.html>

The Fedora s390x team has published a f11 s390x hercules emulator image.
 Since that message was sent, there was a second image published, called
'f11-s390x-20090716.img.bz2' that you'll find in
<http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/spins/S390/>.

I've taken that image, booted it, and done some systemtap testing with
it.  Here's what I've found.

- Setup: Once your host system setup is done, setting the the s390x
guest image is normal for any f11 system.  You'll need to use yum to
install the various packages systemtap needs for development and test.

Note that there isn't a s390x yum debuginfo repository, so you'll have
to download the kernel's debuginfo packages from the s390x project's
koji instance: <http://s390.koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/>

- Speed:  As you can imagine, the emulated s390x system is slow, very
slow.  But, with patience, it is usable.  Note that yum seems to be
extremely slow.

- Systemtap: Systemtap seems to generally work on the emulated s390x
system.  I've worked with kernel is 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x (after a yum
update), so it is much more recent than a rhel5 kernel.

I was never able to get a full systemtap testsuite run completed.  The
first problem I ran into was I kept getting timeouts.  After an increase
of 20x on all timeout values, I didn't get timeouts anymore, but the
testsuite would just hang after awhile.

So, from a systemtap point of view, what could you use this for?

- an easy way to test for compilation errors on an s390x

- a good way to test an individual systemtap testcase/feature

If anyone has any questions, please let me know.

-- 
David Smith
dsmith@redhat.com
Red Hat
http://www.redhat.com
256.217.0141 (direct)
256.837.0057 (fax)