hw_emulation_architecture – Configuring QEMU instance
emulation architecture

Introduction

This capability is to fill a need with environments that do not have
the capability to support the various cpu architectures that are present
today with physical hardware. A small subset of architectures that are
supported both within libvirt and QEMU have been selected as prime
candidates for emulation support.

While support has been added for the below base architectures, this
does not guarantee that every subset or custom operating system that
leverages one of these architectures will function.

Configure

QEMU Binary Support

To ensure that libvirt and QEMU can properly handle the level of cpu
emulation desired by the end-user, you are required to install the
specific qemu-system-XXX, qemu-efi-arm,
qemu-efi-aarch64 binaries on the compute nodes that will be
providing support.

Console Support

Consideration need to be made in regards to which architectures you
want to support, as there are limitations on support through spice,
novnc, and serial. All testing and validation has been done to ensure
that spice and serial connections function as expected.

• AARCH64 – Spice & Serial
• S390X – Serial
• PPC64LE – Spice & Serial
• MIPSEL – untested

Supported Emulated
Architectures

The supported emulated architectures require specific image meta
properties to be set in order to trigger the proper settings to be
configured by libvirtd.

For end users the emulation architecture of an instance is controlled
by the selection of an image with the
hw_emulation_architecture image metadata property set.

AARCH64

Tested and Validated as functional

$ openstack image set --property hw_emulation_architecture=aarch64 $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_machine_type=virt $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_firmware_type=uefi $IMAGE

S390x

Tested and Validated as functional

$ openstack image set --property hw_emulation_architecture=s390x $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_machine_type=s390-ccw-virtio $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_video_model=virtio $IMAGE

PPC64LE

Tested and Validated as functional

$ openstack image set --property hw_emulation_architecture=ppc64le $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_machine_type=pseries $IMAGE

MIPSEL

Testing and validation is ongoing to overcome PCI issues

$ openstack image set --property hw_emulation_architecture=mipsel $IMAGE
$ openstack image set --property hw_machine_type=virt $IMAGE