Description of problem:
In Fedora[1] and Ubuntu[2] the package maintainers of qemu also provide emulators for architectures[3] other than the host, e.g. `qemu-system-arm` provides arm emulation on x86-64 workstations. When building container images for non-x86-64 targets on x86-64 build servers[4] these emulators are useful. We prefer EL8-based systems for our workflow, so it would be useful if these packages were available in epel8, especially one that allows emulating pp64le on x86-64. There have been a couple of these requests for EPEL7[5][6], but this one requests the popular ones (e.g. arm, ppc64le, etc.) for epel8.
Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
EL 8.3
epel-release 10.el8
How reproducible:
Attempt to install the ppc qemu emulator in x86-64 el8 with epel8 repo enabled.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. dnf info qemu-system-ppc.x86_64
Actual results:
Error: No matching Packages to list
Expected results:
Available Packages
Name : qemu-system-ppc
Epoch : 2
Version : 5.1.0
Release : 9.fc33
Architecture : x86_64
Size : 13 k
Source : qemu-5.1.0-9.fc33.src.rpm
Repository : updates
Summary : QEMU system emulator for PPC
URL : http://www.qemu.org/
License : GPLv2 and BSD and MIT and CC-BY
Description : This package provides the QEMU system emulator for PPC and PPC64 systems.
Additional info:
[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
[2]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/misc/qemu-system-ppc
[3]: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-arm.html
[4]: https://community.arm.com/developer/tools-software/tools/b/tools-software-ides-blog/posts/getting-started-with-docker-for-arm-on-linux
[5]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1373998
[6]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1674010
Comment 2Richard W.M. Jones
2021-09-03 12:55:54 UTC
No, this is a giant amount of work and no one has stepped forward to do it.
(I'm not actually sure it's possible given that you'd probably want to stay
in lock step with the qemu-kvm package while being careful not to conflict
with it).
Note also:
* EPEL 7 package hasn't been updated since 2019 and hasn't been
significantly updated since ~2015, so that's 6 years of CVEs right there.
* EPEL 8 branch doesn't exist.
* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1995353