Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 3/3] PPC PReP: can run without bios image

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On 6 April 2013 12:38, Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de> wrote:
>
> On 06.04.2013, at 13:27, Peter Maydell wrote:
>
>> On 6 April 2013 10:07, Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de> wrote:
>>> On ARM, look at highbank. Because we're not running we're lacking
>>> a monitor mode blob that provides sys calls for flushing caches.
>>> Thus today the highbank machine doesn't boot anymore with Linux.
>>> If we ran firmware like the real board, that would provide for the
>>> sys call.
>>
>> We also flat out don't implement enough monitor mode to allow
>> a hypothetical firmware blob to work.
>
> Why don't we implement enough monitor mode?

Because (a) I haven't got round to it (b) doing it properly is
a huge job (c) KVM can't do monitor mode so we need a plan for
a "not really monitor mode" anyway (d) it isn't yet causing
problems on the boards I primarily care about. I'm happy to
review patches if somebody wants to submit them.

> Bottom line is that Linux validly expects that firmware exists.

I agree that we're going to want to run UEFI at some point.
My current plan for this is that we should get a version
of the UEFI firmware which runs in non-secure mode.

-- PMM