testing qemu svn r6636 on FreeBSD; future of qemu on FreeBSD...

Hi!

 After discovering a workaround for the -kernel-kqemu userspace pio bug
in connection with vmware svga/vmmouse a few days ago I made another
experimental FreeBSD qemu-devel port update today,
	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/qemu/qemu-devel-20090218.patch
with the mentioned patches added (the vmware_vga.c depth fix hasn't
been committed yet so I added it to files/patch-hw-vmware_vga.c for now;
the userspace pio workaround patch needed an additional TARGET_I386
check since vmware_vga.c now also gets built for mips targets, see
files/patch-iopl-workaround .)

 Apart from the usb thruput regression with (some?) recent Linux guests
that I already had been mentioning a few times (no change there) and the
recent discussion of qcow2 corruption that was seen with (at least) win2k
guests on recent kvm (which uses similar qcow2 code than qemu svn, see
this thread:
	http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg00713.html
- the consensus on that thread seems to be that qcow(2) code has always
been experimental and you should use raw images if you want reliability;
raw is also usually faster) - apart from these two issues this snapshot
is looking pretty good in my (limited) testing so far; you are encouraged
to test it with your various guests that you have lying around, if it
works for you as well maybe we can indeed update the FreeBSD qemu-devel
port again before the next official qemu release gets cut...

 For the curious, and to get more people testing this, :) here is a
reiteration of a few of the improvements made since the snapshot thats
currently in ports (qemu-devel), in no particular order:

- tcg conversion complete (no longer depends on gcc3)
- gdbstub improvements, like managing cpus as threads, working breakpoints
  etc with -smp, watchpoints...
- added cdc ethernet usb nic (-usbdevice net:)
- e1000 pxe rom, tso, vlan, and other fixes/improvements
- scsi emulation fixes/improvements
- 16550A uart (serial) emulation, reported to work with the new uart(4)
  in FreeBSD-current guests too (except for BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER, altho I
  don't know whether that even works on real hw now so it might not
  actually be qemu's fault)
- no longer depends on aio(4) so no more chances to forget to kldload
  that (uses its own threads now)
- 64 bit host fixes for slirp (-net user)
- added instruction counter
- emulate core2duo and phenom cpus, x86 CPUID extended family/model
  (for example emulate newer amd cpu as:
  -cpu qemu64,family=15,model=65,stepping=3)
- added -clock dynticks support for FreeBSD hosts
- added -serial msmouse (Microsoft serial mouse emulation)
- virtio-{blk,net,balloon,console} (paravirtualization via emulated pci
  devices and corresponding guest drivers)
- added -net channel ... to forward guest slirp tcp connections to
  qemu character devices
- hpet emulation
- (some?) ipv6 support for like vnc
- added a -vga none cli option (the other vga options have been renamed
  too, now you do -vga {none,cirrus,std,vmware} ...)
- fixed media detection on emulated cdroms (helps some Linux guests)
- added -rtc-td-hack option to fix time drift with RTC on Windows
- added "serial" parameter to -drive flag (to specify emulated disk's
  serial number)
- added new option "werror" to -drive flag:
  possible values are:
    report    - report errors to a guest as IO errors
    ignore    - continue as if nothing happened
    stop      - stop VM on any error and retry last command on resume
    enospc    - stop vm on ENOSPC error and retry last command on resume
                all other errors are reported to a guest.
  default is "report"
- added snapshot subcommand for qemu-img (to list, create, apply and delete
  snapshots on qcow2 images)
- x86 now issues reset on triple faults
- (untested on FreeBSD:) live migration support, basic audio functionality
  for vnc.c - malc's ad-hoc client for capturing A/V of running guests is
  here:
	http://repo.or.cz/w/qemu/malc.git?a=tree;f=vcap;hb=capture3
- and of course all kinds of bugfixes, bios updates (rumors are that vista
  guests work now?), and also improvements to non-x86 targets...

 And last, but far from least:

FreeBSD host TODOs - help more than welcome here: (this stuff is working
on Linux hosts, except maybe bsd-user...)

- complete the usb host support (auto dis/connects, isochronous for eg
  webcams etc, support the new usb stack in FreeBSD-current - the original
  author of the FreeBSD usb host patches says he is too busy with other
  stuff now ):
- same for bluetooth...
- scsi passthru support (so you can use eg tape drives or maybe burn
  cds/dvds from guests)
- add arm/ppc/sparc(?) host support to the port(s)
- kvm port!  There was a soc project but it never reached the state of
  entering ports,
	http://wiki.freebsd.org/FabioChecconi/PortingLinuxKVMToFreeBSD
  - and now of course both kvm and the FreeBSD kernel have evolved
  further, and also the first pieces of kvm userland support code have
  entered qemu svn, and it seems at least some people _might_ want to
  retire kqemu some time in the future too, see this thread...
	http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg00326.html
- test/fix bsd-user (qemu-sparc64; i386 host linker script seems to be
  needed at the very least)
- write/port virtio guest drivers for FreeBSD (will also be useful for
  kvm hosts which are getting more common even tho at least atm they
  have to run Linux...)

 If you have read until here, thanx! :)
	Juergen