Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC][PATCH 000/111] QEMU m68k core additions

[Rob Landley]

On 08/20/2011 06:17 PM, Natalia Portillo wrote:
>> or ancient macintosh support
> 
> Most of the hardware (but a few required ones like SWIM) is already
> in QEMU, you need to glue everything, make Toolbox be VERY happy
> about its environment, make Mac OS boot so it can second-boot Linux
> (the direct-booter is so buggy it may introduce phantom bugs on the
> emulation) and implement the MMU.

I haven't got a copy of ancient MacOS.

Why is the direct booter buggy?  I'm happy to track down and isolate
phantom bugs, either in the kernel or in qemu.  (One nice thing about
emulators is you can get deterministic regression tests reasonably
easily. :)

How do I _use_ the direct booter, anyway?  I built mac_defconfig in 3.0
but it only gave me a vmlinux, which faulted on the instruction at
address 0.  I tried m68k-objdump -O binary vmlinux vmlinux.bin but that
wouldnt' bot at all (qemu -kernel refused to load it).

>> that Linux could boot on?  (I.E. I'm interested in Linux system 
>> emulation of non-coldfire m68k.  So far that means "use aranym".)
> 
> Linux requires the MMU and an almost complete hardware emulation. 
> Standard m68k emulations (UAE, Aranym and specially BasiliskII) try
> to patch the OS to work.

That's kinda sad.  Is there a web page anywhere that elaborates on this?

> Indeed BasiliskII is anything but a real macintosh emulator, as it
> patches heavily the Toolbox and Mac OS (that's why Linux and A/UX
> will never work on it)

I believe toolbox is the ancient mac bios, correct?  Does Linux need/use
it at all?

Rob