Transitioning the virtualisation library to a pre-existing solution rather than using Sedna

[DecDuck]

From my understanding, development has stopped due to some issues with the underlying RISC-V library, Sedna. I wanted to chat about potentially moving to different library/solution to restart development or move it to active developers.

[DecDuck]

As mentioned in the Sedna issue, the issue does not persist in QEMU (See fnuecke/sedna#12). As a somewhat unlikable alternative to pure-Java emulation, it's possible to use a QEMU client (something like https://github.com/shevek/qemu-java) instead of running the emulator within Java.

[DecDuck]

I suggested QEMU because it's a known-good RISC-V VM. Honestly, a generic interface could be created in Java and then have a variety of implementations depending on what's installed.

[DecDuck]

That might actually be the first step - migrating to a generic interface and then moving Sedna to that interface.

[untodesu]

Good idea, I guess

[donmor]

Maybe we can just let the mod download prebuilt qemu binaries during game initialization, if executable qemu-system-riscv64 is not detected in PATH.

[donmor]

BTW I wonder if we can have raw images stored in NBT and provided to qemu as NBD via sockets.