Re: [Qemu-devel] IBM makes AIX 6 beta available for download for everyone

[Andreas Färber]

Am 19.07.2007 um 09:23 schrieb Natalia Portillo:

> El jue, 19-07-2007 a las 00:46 +0200, Andreas Färber escribió:
> > Am 18.07.2007 um 18:26 schrieb Blue Swirl:
> >
> > > > > It looks like open hack'ware is pretty much stalled, so its hard
> > > > > telling
> > > > > what progress will be made futurewise.
> > > >
> > > > Might it be possible to replace it with OpenBIOS?
> > >
> > > Sure, and as both are GPL useful, code can be shared. But some PPC
> > > developers are needed. It may still be easier to fix the OHW bugs  
> > > than
> > > start over anew.
> >
> > Not sure I understand... I thought Open Firmware was based on
> > platform independent Forth code?
> > I'm running on ppc64 and could try to compile something under Linux
> > in case that's the problem.
> Yes, OF is basically a Forth-interpreter.
> Of course this Forth-interpreter is in C and compile to machine  
> code :p

Yes, that is obvious. Not so obvious was what ppc *developers* were  
needed for.
I got the other answer afterwards saying that HFS etc. support needed  
to be added.


> Try to compile OpenBIOS under Linux/PPC (using 32bit compiler, not
> ppc64) and comment us.

I tried SVN HEAD of both fcode-utils and openbios-devel.

OpenBIOS supposedly has support for ppc and cross-ppc archs but that  
is not true. It currently only has support for cross-ppc (for the old  
PearPC emulator it seems). I copied these files as ppc_config.xml and  
ppc_rules.xml respectively to get the ppc target, in ppc_rules.xml  
changed the tool names to use the standard gcc etc. and was able to  
compile okay. Products based on this unmodified configuration were  
among others an openbios-pearpc.elf file - I thus changed ppc_rom.bin  
in some ppc files to this filename. Launching qemu-system-sparc -boot  
d -cdrom /dev/cdrom with a Debian Etch DVD inserted resulted in an  
opcode error. My guess thus is that this OpenBIOS file is not suited  
for qemu in that configuration?

Some observations that might be of interest:
- OpenBIOS has support for some (not all) PowerPC processors  
according to some Readme
- it specifically mentions ppc/AIX and has some apparent IBM  
contributions despite the missing ppc target
- the cross-ppc config mentions HFS and HFSP which I guess refer to  
HFS and HFS+ filesystems respectively (HFS was set to false, HFSP to  
true)

Maybe someone can shed some more light on what exactly needs to be  
changed config-wise or is missing in OpenBIOS or qemu in order to  
boot AIX 6 or any Linux.

Andreas