Comment # 32 on bug 1202138 from Oliver Kurz

(In reply to Michal Suchanek from comment #31)
> What kind of hardware is powerqaworker-qam-1.qa.suse.de?

Yes, this is of course also Power8.
https://racktables.nue.suse.com/index.php?page=object&tab=default&object_id=9710
says it's in particular IBM Power System S822LC

> So far the problematic workers were POWER8 which use the old KVM code which
> gets very little testing upstream.
> 
> Further, the problematic workers use 'openpower' firmware. That's some
> specific firmware different from what most machines use, and the little
> testing that is done by upstream on POWER8 likely happens on different
> firmware that also supports PowerVM.
> 
> Finally the virtualization team does not provide any support for KVM on
> Power at all. Any support we have is best-effort. I don't have any POWER8
> hardware capable of running KVM available.

Let me try to use this channel. Maybe we can find an answer here to a question
that was never properly answered elsewhere: What do you consider the best way
to run virtual machine based tests on PowerPC and how to implement that? So far
we always preferred qemu based tests because we can use the same on x86_64,
aarch64, ppc64le (so far) as well as even s390x. Also this way we can scale
best because machines can be created on the fly based on test parameters, e.g.
RAM and storage size as needed for testing. For PowerVM we have a testing
"backend" but it has very limited capabilities compared to bare-metal tests,
e.g. interact with pre-configured LPARs and no support to save/load virtual
machine images. And implementing that would require very specific PowerVM
knowledge and any solution would only be valid for PowerPC. So, what is your
take on it?