[Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Blue Swirl]

Hi,

Just to avoid any duplicate work, I'd like to announce that I've been 
working on Sparc system level emulation. The emulation is not yet usable, a 
modified Linux kernel binary is loaded, it reprograms MMU, jumps to high 
memory, but crashes when it tries to access openprom (not implemented).

What is implemented:
Privileged instructions (somewhat complete, but buggy)
Sparc reference MMU (complete)

To do:
Openprom (Is there a FOSS one or even documentation? Otherwise make minimal 
stubs to get Linux running)
Hardware (serial, ethernet, scsi, probably not graphics nor keyboard)

The HW part needs a little thought. Sparc HW is memory-mapped, but there are 
separate address spaces, for example user data address space identifier is 
ASI 10, supervisor (kernel) 11, mmu regs 4 etc. I'd like to design a generic 
interface like used for i386 register_ioport_write and _read.

Any hackers out there with plenty of free time and know Sparc architecture?

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Re: [Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Patrick Mauritz]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:12:00 +0200, Blue Swirl <blueswir1@hotmail.com> wrote:
> To do:
> Openprom (Is there a FOSS one or even documentation? Otherwise make minimal
> stubs to get Linux running)
> Hardware (serial, ethernet, scsi, probably not graphics nor keyboard)
www.openbios.org - I'm one of the developers.. we usually hang out on
irc.freenode.net, #openbios


patrick mauritz

Re: [Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Blue Swirl]

Thank you for the tip, but Openbios does not support Sparc.

On your page was a link to Proll (Sparc Prom code for Javastations to enable 
booting Linux). It looks more promising, I may even get a graphical console 
running soon.

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Re: [Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Patrick Mauritz]

On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 23:11:43 +0200, Blue Swirl <blueswir1@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the tip, but Openbios does not support Sparc.
it's pretty portable, actually, for emulation it's especially easy to
adapt (as you can avoid the lowlevel init stuff - no-one cares for
that part as long as the state is right, which you can accomplish
differently in an emulator).

what do you need - a firmware image built for SPARC for a certain
start address (easy) and fcode images to initialize the "hardware"
(more work), anything else?

for the fcode images, the interfaces to use is important. I guess you
want to emulate some real chipsets, as most operating systems don't
rely on the services of openfirmware at all, not even as fallback -
which is a shame.

looking at proll, it seems like linux is a bad choice for the first
iteration of a port as it seems to rely on inofficial firmware
properties - netbsd should be more compliant

patrick mauritz

Re: [Qemu-devel] Sparc system emulation in progress

[Blue Swirl]

I agree that Openbios route would be cleaner, but the uglier Proll+Linux 
combination enables me to focus more on the Qemu side, instead of learning 
Netbsd and implementing the bottom half of Openbios. On the bad side, Proll 
fixes the hardware configuration, but then it is something known (Sun4m with 
TCX).

Maybe some Proll code could be lifted to arch-specific part Openbios? Both 
are GPL.

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