[Qemu-devel] Re: Solaris/SPARC binaries

[Qemu-devel] Re: Solaris/SPARC binaries

[Blue Swirl]

Hi,

Sparc V8 system emulator is very much complete, but in practice some hidden 
bugs in it (and also bugs in Proll's Openprom support) make the emulator 
fragile. It can only run Linux 2.6 series, 2.4 or BSDs won't run. Probably 
some heavy debugging could make a difference, but it seems that general 
interest for the emulator is low.

I haven't tried Solaris for Sparc V8, it would be interesting to hear the 
results.

V9 emulation is getting better, but it's still not usable for anything yet. 
For example, support for execution in memory above >4G limit (in 32-bit 
host) was committed to CVS only a few days ago. Maybe the user mode emulator 
could run 64-bit Linux binaries, but I don't have any.

It might be possible to make a Solaris user mode emulator by translating 
Solaris system calls to Linux, but it could be a lot of work.

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Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Solaris/SPARC binaries

[Hetz Ben Hamo]

You wrote:

> Probably some heavy debugging could make a difference, but it seems that general
> interest for the emulator is low.
> 
> I haven't tried Solaris for Sparc V8, it would be interesting to hear the
> results.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who really wants
to use Solaris 7/8/9/10 Sparc binaries with your Sparc emulation part,
and I hear it a lot from other people I show them QEMU - whether they
are writing open source software and want to test it on SPARC, or some
(very) small companies who would want to port their software to SPARC,
but the steep price of SPARC based machine scares them.

Look what happend to QEMU: when it was at version 0.4.x (if I recall
correctly) and it was only able to run wine on non X86 machines, the
interest in the project was pretty low (I know because I follow this
project for quite a lot of time). Once Fabrice added System level
emulation and the features to boot and use other OS's (Linux, BSD,
WIndows, Solaris/X86, OS/2) - the interest in QEMU jumped through the
roof, and you can hear the word "QEMU" almost everywhere.

Thanks,
Hetz

Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Solaris/SPARC binaries

[Herbert Poetzl]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 10:05:14AM +0200, Blue Swirl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sparc V8 system emulator is very much complete, but in practice some hidden 
> bugs in it (and also bugs in Proll's Openprom support) make the emulator 
> fragile. It can only run Linux 2.6 series, 2.4 or BSDs won't run. Probably 
> some heavy debugging could make a difference, but it seems that general 
> interest for the emulator is low.

well, just to let you know ... I'm interested in the emulator
(is there some howto available, regarding openprom and such?)

TIA,
Herbert

> I haven't tried Solaris for Sparc V8, it would be interesting to hear the 
> results.
> 
> V9 emulation is getting better, but it's still not usable for anything yet. 
> For example, support for execution in memory above >4G limit (in 32-bit 
> host) was committed to CVS only a few days ago. Maybe the user mode 
> emulator could run 64-bit Linux binaries, but I don't have any.
> 
> It might be possible to make a Solaris user mode emulator by translating 
> Solaris system calls to Linux, but it could be a lot of work.
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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> 
> 
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> Qemu-devel mailing list
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Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Solaris/SPARC binaries

[Blue Swirl]

>well, just to let you know ... I'm interested in the emulator
>(is there some howto available, regarding openprom and such?)

http://www.openfirmware.org/

I've learned most things by reading the sources (Proll, Linux 
arch/sparc/prom, silo). Luckily, the code base is not large.

A nice way of getting into action could be trying to run a simple 
application in the user mode emulator and see if it breaks and why. The 
debug logs are very interesting, as is tracing execution with outside gdb.

Here's an example with Linux and system emulator.
One shell:
qemu-system-sparc -kernel vmlinux-2.6.11+tcx -d in_asm,int -nographic -s -S
Other shell:
sparc-linux-gdb vmlinux-2.6.11+tcx
(here's a cross-gdb, could be a native gdb in remote Sparc machine)
(optionally in a third shell: tail -f /tmp/qemu.log)
(gdb) b prom_init
Breakpoint 1 at 0xf0266b78: file arch/sparc/prom/init.c, line 46.
(gdb) target remote :1234
0xffd00000 in ?? ()
(gdb) c

Breakpoint 1, prom_init (rp=0xffd1b538) at arch/sparc/prom/init.c:46
46      arch/sparc/prom/init.c: No such file or directory.
        in arch/sparc/prom/init.c
(gdb) fin
0xf0251790 in sun4c_continue_boot () at include/asm/uaccess.h:305
305     include/asm/uaccess.h: No such file or directory.
        in include/asm/uaccess.h
(gdb) p/x *romvec
$4 = {pv_magic_cookie = 0x10010407, pv_romvers = 0x3,
  pv_plugin_revision = 0x4d, pv_printrev = 0x10203, pv_v0mem = {
[etc.]

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