QEMU for NetBSD
Current status
Summary of the current status of QEMU hosted on a NetBSD host.
What works?
Quick summary:
The NetBSD target builds and works out of the box with elementary features.
There is a pkgsrc package that ships a recent version.
QEMU should work with all currently supported NetBSD versions starting from 6.x.
QEMU as of today is not PaX MPROTECT safe.
All tests in the check target pass.
NetBSD is a maintained platform.
Standard features matrix
Elementary features for NetBSD are probably well supported.
| Name | Description | NetBSD status |
|---|---|---|
| python | Python programming language | should work |
| smbd | Samba | net/samba, untested |
| git | GIT VCS | should work |
| debug | should work | |
| sanitizers | ASan, UBSan, ASan headers | should work |
| sanitizers Fibers | Asan headers with fibers | Futue GCC/Clang should work |
| stack-protector | Stack protector | works |
| audio oss | OSS audio backend | should work |
| audio sdl | SDL audio backend | should work |
| coroutine ucontext | should work | |
| coroutine sigaltstack | should work | |
| coroutine windows | N/A, Windows specific | |
| slirp | User networking | works |
| tcg-interpreter | Tiny Code Generator | should work |
| malloc-trim | GNU malloc(3) optimization | N/A, Linux specific |
| gcov | Test Coverage Program | should work |
| gprof | GNU profiling | should work |
| profiler | should work |
Optional feature matrix
Additional features support various extensions, most of them are a matter of using the emulator with a 3rd party and are OS independent.
Part of features require OS specific extensions.
| Name | Description | NetBSD status |
|---|---|---|
| system | all system emulation targets | works |
| user | supported user emulation targets | broken |
| linux-user | all linux usermode emulation targets | N/A |
| bsd-user | all BSD usermode emulation targets | broken (FreeBSD ships local patches) |
| docs | build documentation | should work |
| guest-agent | build the QEMU Guest Agent | unknown, probably broken |
| guest-agent-msi | build guest agent Windows MSI installation package | unknown, probably broken |
| pie | Position Independent Executables | should work |
| modules | QEMU modules support (not kernel modules) | unknown, should work |
| debug-tcg | TCG debugging (default is disabled) | should work |
| debug-info | debugging information | should work |
| sparse | sparse checker | should work |
| gnutls | GNUTLS cryptography support | should work |
| nettle | nettle cryptography support | should work |
| gcrypt | libgcrypt cryptography support | should work |
| sdl | SDL UI | should work |
| --with-sdlabi | select preferred SDL ABI 1.2 or 2.0 | should work, not imporant |
| gtk | gtk UI | should work |
| --with-gtkabi | select preferred GTK ABI 2.0 or 3.0 | should work, not important |
| vte | vte support for the gtk UI | should work |
| curses | curses UI | works with native NetBSD 8.0 curses(3) |
| vnc | VNC UI support | should work |
| vnc-sasl | SASL encryption for VNC server | should work |
| vnc-jpeg | JPEG lossy compression for VNC server | should work |
| vnc-png | PNG compression for VNC server | should work |
| cocoa | Cocoa UI (Mac OS X only) | N/A, Darwin specific |
| virtfs | VirtFS | probably broken |
| mpath | Multipath persistent reservation passthrough | unknown, problably not supported |
| xen | xen backend driver support | unknown |
| xen-pci-passthrough | PCI passthrough support for Xen | unknown, probably not supported |
| brlapi | BrlAPI (Braile) | unknown, should work |
| curl | curl connectivity | should work |
| membarrier | membarrier system call (for Linux 4.14+ or Windows) | not supported |
| fdt | fdt device tree | unknown, should work |
| bluez | bluez stack connectivity | unknown |
| kvm | KVM acceleration support | N/A , Linux specific kernel APIs required in userland |
| hax | HAX acceleration support | mostly works |
| hvf | Hypervisor.framework acceleration support | not ported, Darwin specific |
| whpx | Windows Hypervisor Platform acceleration support | N/A |
| rdma | Enable RDMA-based migration and PVRDMA support | unknown, probably not supported |
| vde | support for vde network | probably not supported and Linux specific as of today |
| netmap | support for netmap network | not supported (FreeBSD specific?) |
| linux-aio | Linux AIO support | not supported, Linux specific |
| cap-ng | libcap-ng support | not supported, Linux specific |
| attr | attr and xattr support | N/A, Linux specific ? |
| vhost-net | vhost-net acceleration support | not supported |
| vhost-crypto | vhost-crypto acceleration support | not supported |
| spice | spice | unknown, probably not supported |
| rbd | rados block device (rbd) | unknown |
| libiscsi | iscsi support | unknown |
| libnfs | nfs support | unknown |
| smartcard | smartcard support (libcacard) | unknown |
| libusb | libusb (for usb passthrough) | unknown |
| live-block-migration | Block migration in the main migration stream | unknown |
| usb-redir | usb network redirection support | unknown |
| lzo | support of lzo compression library | should work |
| snappy | support of snappy compression library | should work |
| bzip2 | support of bzip2 compression library | should work |
| seccomp | seccomp support | Linux specific  |
| coroutine-pool | coroutine freelist (better performance) | unknown |
| glusterfs | GlusterFS backend | unknown |
| tpm | TPM support | unknown |
| libssh2 | ssh block device support | should work |
| numa | libnuma support | not ported |
| libxml2 | for Parallels image format | should work |
| tcmalloc | tcmalloc support | should work |
| jemalloc | jemalloc support | works |
| replication | replication support | not ported, N/A ?, Linux specific |
| vhost-vsock | virtio sockets device support | not ported |
| opengl | opengl support | unknown |
| virglrenderer | virgl rendering support | unknown |
| xfsctl | xfsctl support | N/A / not ported |
| qom-cast-debug | cast debugging support | unknown |
| tools | build qemu-io, qemu-nbd and qemu-image tools | works (userland nbd only) |
| vxhs | Veritas HyperScale vDisk backend support | N/A ? |
| crypto-afalg | Linux AF_ALG crypto backend driver | N/A / not ported |
| vhost-user | vhost-user support | not ported |
| capstone | capstone disassembler support | should work |
External features
- HQEMU
HQEMU is a retargetable and multi-threaded dynamic binary translator on multicores. It integrates QEMU and LLVM as its building blocks. The translator in the enhanced QEMU acts as a fast translator with low translation overhead. The optimization-intensive LLVM optimizer running on separate threads dynamically improves code for higher performance. With the hybrid QEMU+LLVM approach, HQEMU can achieve low translation overhead and good translated code quality. HQEMU supports process-level emulation and full-system virtualization. It provides translation modes of running the QEMU translator and LLVM optimizer in one process, or running the LLVM optimizer as a stand-alone optimization server (version 0.13.0).
http://itanium.iis.sinica.edu.tw/hqemu/
- DPDK
DPDK is a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing.
- The ultimate CPU emulator
Unicorn is a lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture CPU emulator framework.
https://www.unicorn-engine.org/
Prioritized tasks
Upstream remaining local pkgsrc patches, mostly (old?) NetBSD and SmartOS related ones.
Make QEMU PaX MPROTECT safe.
Develop NetBSD USER emulation, attempt to either share the code with FreeBSD (bsd-user, old broken, downstream patches) or with Linux (linux-user, recent, actively maintained). Preferred approach is to share as much code with linux-user as possible, regardless of the state of bsd-user.
HAXM
HAXM is a cross-platform hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor), widely used as an accelerator for Android Emulator and QEMU. It has always supported running on Windows and macOS, and has been ported to other host operating systems as well, such as Linux and NetBSD.
HAXM runs as a kernel-mode driver on the host operating system, and provides a KVM-like interface to user space, thereby enabling applications like QEMU to utilize the hardware virtualization capabilities built into modern Intel CPUs, namely Intel Virtualization Technology.
More information on the porting process is available on The NetBSD blog:
http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_hardware_assisted_virtualization_challenge
A tutorial (outdated) by an early user of the support:
http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/
NetBSD/amd64 is the only supported host of the package, but it shouldn't be difficult to expand it to Darwin, Windows and Linux if there would be users and maintainers for these OSes.
NetBSD as host version 8.0 and HEAD (8.99.3x) tested. The minimal version that could work in theory is 6.x, but everything prior 8.0 is untested.
There is no longer need to keep a patched host kernel.
There is need to keep at least a copy of syssrc in /usr/src(/sys).
Guests known to work:
- NetBSD/amd64 8.99.3x (other variations untested)
- Windows 7 32-bit
- FreeBSD 12 32-bit
- Linux (noapic boot)
- Minix3 i386
- Plan9 (i386?)
- FREEDOS
Other OSes are either broken or untested.
Usage:
- Install emulators/haxm from pkgsrc
- Install emulators/qemu 3.1.0nb5 or newer from pkgsrc
- Use auxiliary scripts for HAXM (superuser privileges needed)
- Append HAXM option to qemu (qemu --accel hax)
Auxiliary scripts in the HAXM package:
- haxm-mknod # creates /dev entries
- haxm-modload # insert the HAXM kernel module
- haxm-modunload # remove the HAXM module from kernel
Optionally grant access to the HAXM device nodes to user(s):
- /dev/HAX
- /dev/hax_vm/vm{00-07}
- /dev/hax_vm{00-07}/vcpu{00-16}