Re: [Qemu-devel] Just to add one single point

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Sunday 08 April 2007 7:19 pm, Paul Brook wrote:
> > Mr Paul Brook did break the PREP and heathrow machines while doing
> > changes in the PCI code. There were some posts on this list reporting
> > this and he never even tried to fix what he broke. And now he's
> > complaining "I cannot test as it does not work". Looks like a bad joke,
> > no ?
> 
> AFAIK PPC emulation hasn't *ever* worked well enough to boot without at 
least 
> building a custom linux kernel. In addition the -kernel commandline option 
> have no effect, and there is no test image available.

By the way, if this ever _does_ start to work, I'd appreciate hearing about 
it.

Right now, my build scripts are building a PowerPC kernel and ext2 filesystem 
image, using a procedure that works on arm, mips, x86, and x86-64.  It's 
producing a _result_, but I have no idea if it actually works.  I do know 
that I can't run it under qemu the way I can all the others.  (Even sparc at 
least _boots_, I think its problem is a uClibc issue.)

http://landley.net/code/firmware/downloads/image

Shell scripts to build all that from source (plus cross compilers and a 
tarball of the files in the ext2 image) are one level up.

> I stand by my original statement.
> A machine that requires building a custom kernel, maybe hacking a
> bootloader, and creating a bootable filesystem from scratch is untestable.

Well, it's certainly inconvenient.  The custom kernel I can do, the filesystem 
I've got.  But bootloaders are a bit of a weak spot with me...

Rob
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