xqemu VS k8s-lab-terraform-libvirt

These projects are called compatibility layers, or "translation layers" sometimes. I think XQEmu (OG XBox on PC) works the same.

Yes:

https://xemu.app/

https://xqemu.com/

Are both original Xbox emulators built off of QEMU. I've only used Xemu, but performance was pretty good for the games I tried on it (it doesn't have a way to upscale rendering yet though).

It's indeed a bit like a kexec.

On system initialization, kernel routines are copied into RAM by the bootloader[1]. Executables run in ring 0, and have a jump table to call kernel routines in their own address space (IIRC) [2].

As such, loading any executable counts as a soft reboot.

Also, there is a functioning open source emulator, Xqemu [3] (and its sibling/fork focused on speed and compatibility more than accuracy, xemu [4])

I recommend reading "17 mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system", which is very informative [5].

[1]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/Boot_Process

[2]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel

[3]: https://xqemu.com/

[4]: https://xemu.app/

[5]: https://xboxdevwiki.net/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xb...

There is one emulator currently that does do that, the "XQEMU" emulator for the original Xbox https://xqemu.com/

It's in its infant stages at the moment according to the "Emulation General" wiki and focuses heavily on "accuracy" over performance

Other emulators such as CXBX-Reloaded have made larger strides, currently emulating roughly 10% of the software library

It's also worth stating, while the Xbox seems like an "easy" target, being based on an ia-32 (Pentium III) PC with an Nvidia GeForce chip (somewhere between a Geforce 2 and 3 at the time) it is an absolutely monstrous beast with minimal documentation about its hardware and numerous "gotchas"

It also has a very small library of 'exclusive' content which detracts from gaining many developers

https://blog.ruanbekker.com/blog/2020/10/08/using-the-libvir...

I include the blog link because there is some nuance in how to get the path right for community Terraform providers that aren't in the Hashicorp registry. The documentation on the GitHub project isn't quite up to date with respect to how the latest versions of Terraform expect the plugin paths to be set up.

I've done this pretty successfully with all the major Linux distros minus Arch, which requires some bootstrapping to get an iso that Packer can work with (no such thing as an answers file for Arch). It's not that big a deal, though. Just find some instructions on how to create and mount a cloud-init iso in addition to the installer iso and use that to add an ssh public key so you can script the installation steps externally. I actually think Packer can do this, but I just haven't gotten it to work yet and have relied on shell scripts.

Hyper-V actually has a very comprehensive PowerShell module that is pretty well documented, by the way: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/hyper-v/?.... I've found it pretty easy to use and actually got the Arch auto-provision working on Hyper-V in Windows before I got it working in KVM in Linux.

Another thing is you can just use the cloud images and cloud-init for bootstrapping everything pretty easily, even on-prem. cloud-init has a "no cloud" config option, as mentioned above, where you just mount an iso with the config data as a DVD drive and cloud-init will find it automatically when the distro iso boots.

This guy has a pretty comprehensive example of how to set up a kubernetes homelab entirely using the libvirt Terraform provider from Ubuntu cloud images bootstrapped with cloud-init: https://github.com/zloeber/k8s-lab-terraform-libvirt