68kMLA Classic Interface
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| Click here to select a new forum. | | Headless Classic Mac OS 'server' in an emulator | Posted by: halkyardo on 2024-03-07 13:07:22
Lately I've had a few situations where it would be nice to have an always-on 68k server running System 7 or some such. Since I don't have a spare machine to dedicate to such a role (and don't really want to deal with the space and power consumption of running vintage-hardware 24/7), I thought this would be a great job for the recently-added Quadra 800 emulation in QEMU - it could just live as another VM instance on the Linux box I already run various services on, and I could just connect to it using QEMU's builtin VNC server when I need to mess with it.
If this were an x86 virtual machine, I'd just use libvirt and virt-manager to manage setting up the VM and all the relevant network configuration. The problem is, libvirt doesn't seem to work properly with m68k guest instances - it'll create them, but they won't start because it seems to want to create the VM with a PCI bus, which QEMU (quite reasonably) refuses to do. I've more or less figured out the necessary QEMU command line and network configuration that I need, but before I go about building my own automation to make it work, has anyone else done this (or something similar) before? I'm getting the "wow this is a LOT harder than it should be" vibe that usually means I'm either way off the beaten path, or have missed some glaringly obvious thing that would make my life easier. | Posted by: cy384 on 2024-03-08 13:59:27
are you looking for a nice way to have it start automatically (and manually stop/start, plus logging)? making it a systemd service shouldn't be too hard | | 1 |
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