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.
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.
