[Qemu-devel] powerpc system emulation and the need for ppc-rom.bin (firmware)

[Martin <qemumail@olifantasia.com>]

Jocelyn mentioned some time ago that powerpc (system)emulation could be 
broken at the moment because there are some majore changes in progress.
At the moment it does build just fine only it is not usable because it 
thinks it needs a powerpc rom bios (firmware)
This loading is done in hw/ppc_prep.c (and hw/ppc_chrp.c)
up and until revision 1.10 of ppc_prep.c the loading was done in the 
else part of if(linux_boot)
In other words, if you load a linux kernel directly you don't need 
ppc_rom.bin

from version 1.11 and on qemu always tries to load ppc_rom.bin (and 
always fails because it is not there: "could not load PPC PREP bios 
'/usr/local/share/qemu/ppc_rom.bin'")

Is there a special reason for this?
Otherwise I would suggest moving it back in the else clause so we can 
still use recent cvs snapshots (with new features and bugfixes like pci 
support)
It would of course also be great if a (working) ppc_rom firmware would 
be available.
How is the progress on this going?
Jocelyn, what are you using at the moment, an existing firmware for a 
real device or an opensource openfirmware implementation?

I also found that there is a new commandline option -prep
I think this chooses between prep and chrp emulation.
How different are the two emulations at the moment?

Greetings,
Martin


hw/ppc_prep.c
Revision: 1.10

if (linux_boot) {
/* Do stuff to load linux kernel */
} else
{
/* allocate and load BIOS ppc_rom.bin */
}

hw/ppc_prep.c
Revision: 1.11, Wed May 26 22:53:03 2004 UTC (2 weeks ago) by bellard

/* allocate and load BIOS ppc_rom.bin */
if (linux_boot) {
/* Do stuff to load linux kernel */
}