Jeremy Drake wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Tom Dunstan wrote:
>
>> I was under the impression that most VM products are x86 centric, which
>> wouldn't lead to huge amounts of diversity in the buildfarm results. At least,
>> not as far as architecture goes.
>
> I have played with QEmu (www.qemu.org) which is open source and supports
> multiple target architectures. I'm not sure how stable all of the
> different targets are, I know that sparc64 is not quite done yet.
Oh, I didn't realize Qemu did non-x86 architectures. Is it considered
good enough at emulating e.g. a sparc for it to be useful to us? PearPC
was a PowerPC emulator that got some press a while ago, although it
appears that the project has stagnated a bit (probably because people
who wanted to run OSX on intel hardware have a legit way to do it now :) )
The problem with these things is if something goes wrong, was it the
patch that failed or the not-quite-perfect VM product? To cut down on
those sorts of problems, I suppose we could have it do a clean,
non-patched run first, and then only do the patched version if the clean
version passed. We'd have to be reasonably unlucky to have a patch
trigger a VM bug under those circumstance, I would think.
Cheers
Tom