[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI using QEMU, runs very slows during booting to installer?

[James Madgwick]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2025 00:38:24 -0400
Nick <atod101101 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I tried the text installer 20250606 and 20241026 with similar
> results. It appears all the services are timing out and CPU usage is
> extremely high.  I tried similar using VirtualBox and the installer
> comes up much quicker (minute vs 30+ minutes).
> 
> Is this the correct QEMU 10.x invocation?  Any guidance on debugging
> this? qemu-system-x86_64 -name guest=openindiana -m 8G \
> -cpu max,hv_relaxed,hv_time,hv_synic,-xsaves \
> -smp cpus=2,sockets=2,cores=1,threads=1 -device virtio-vga,id=video0 \
> -device virtio-net-pci,mac=6E:C0:E6:AA:6B:BD,netdev=vioif0 \
> -netdev user,id=vioif0 -object
> rng-random,filename=/dev/urandom,id=viornd0 \ -device
> virtio-rng-pci,rng=viornd0 -audiodev coreaudio,id=Sound \ -device
> ac97,audiodev=Sound -k it -drive format=raw,file=oi-0.img,if=virtio \
> -rtc base=localtime -device ich9-ahci,id=sata \
> -drive file=OI-hipster-text-20250606.iso,media=cdrom,if=ide,index=2

I would expect to see an "--enable-kvm" flag or similar. Without this
QEMU will emulate the CPU instead of using any virtualisation features.
So far as I know VirtualBox isn't an emulator and so will always run
using virtualisation. Using emulation would result in significantly
reduced performance and high CPU usage - this is likely the cause of
what you are seeing.