[Qemu-devel] [Bug 1191326] Re: QNX 4 doesn't boot on qemu >= 1.3

[Christian Bohr]

Hi,

I had the same problem, and maybe it can help. I wrote my own toy OS
with a PATA / IDE driver back in 2012 using older version of QEMU and
everything worked fine. These days, I tried that on a recent version
(2.5) and it failed with exactly the same behaviour - lots of zeros
being written during a DMA transfer.

After some research, I found that the behaviour that was changed with
1.3 is that the bus master configuration bit (bit 2 of the PCI command
register) is now emulated, and my driver did not set this bit.
Apparently, the BIOS does not set it either, so it was off and the DMA
transfer silently failed and only wrote zeros.

So I added some code to my init routine that sets this bit, and voila -
it worked. I have tried 1.2, 1.3 and 2.5.0 and this works with all of
them.

I do not know the internals of QNX, but I learned that apparently also
Linux did not set this bit in older version, so it might very well be
that QNX does not set it either and this is the issue.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1191326

Title:
  QNX 4 doesn't boot on qemu >= 1.3

Status in QEMU:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  I am using virtual machine with QNX4 operating system installed on it.  I 
updated my qemu from version
  to newer and QNX4 doesn't start any more. All is ok on version 1.2 but when I 
try to use any newer version
  (1.3, 1.4, 1.5)  QNX4 doesn't boot.  I tried on windows and linux ubuntu 
hosts - effects are the same.

  When virtual machine boots qnx bootloader loads and starts operating system. 
In the next step
  qnx starts its ide driver, which detects qemu harddisk and cdrom. Problem 
starts when operating system
  tries mount partition - an error occur and qnx stop booting procedure:

  mount -p "No bios signature in partition sector on /dev/hd0"

  I have tried install qnx from cdrom but it seems that there is the same 
problem. QNX installer boot from
  cdrom, detects hard disk and cdrom, but cdrom can't be mounted in the next 
step of installation procedure.

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