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

["J. Mayer" <l_indien@magic.fr>]

On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 00:19 +0100, 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.

So you never did use it.
I never had to use a custom kernel to boot the PowerPC target, apart in the very first step of developments.
PREP, heathrow and Mac99 machine used to run standard Linux distributions, from install CDROMs and installed hard disk drives.
Mac99 still does.

> 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.

True. But that's not Qemu-PPC you are talking about.
It did boot some standard Linux distributions 3 years ago and still does (just the Mac99 machine, for now).
I don't say it boots every OS for PowerPC machines, but it does boot at least quite a lot of Linux distros.
Even if I do just test 3 because I'm working more on the core emulation, those days, and my care is not to introduce regressions.
And because it's already quite long to check 3 distributions.

-- 
J. Mayer <l_indien@magic.fr>
Never organized