Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Mac99: Enable -kernel option

[Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>]

On 3/1/09, Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 05:42:11PM +0200, Blue Swirl wrote:
>  > On 2/28/09, Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de> wrote:
>  > > Right now -kernel on the Mac99 (newworld) is broken.
>  > >
>  > >  For starters, the kernel is 1:1 mapped into to virtual machine, which
>  > >  is not what OpenBIOS expects - it wants a preprocessed ELF image.
>  > >  So I just copied over the code from oldworld.c that loads the kernel.
>  > >
>  > >  While this is not overly pretty, it works so far and keeps working
>  > >  code working. I don't feel comfortable on restructuring newworld and
>  > >  oldworld just yet - AFAIK newworld is not exactly is a good shape anyways.
>  > >
>  > >  The second issue is the NVRAM. It doesn't get initialized, so the
>  > >  firmware has no idea that a kernel image was actually loaded!
>  > >
>  > >  I first tried to use the macio nvram device that was specified there,
>  > >  but that didn't work out, so in order to get something working for now,
>  > >  I took the code from oldworld.c again, which works at least with
>  > >  OpenBIOS.
>  >
>  > There have been some discussions to switch to using the firmware
>  > configuration device for the kernel address etc. Then the NVRAM
>  > structure would not be used. These patches (by Aurelien and myself)
>  > should do the switch.
>
>
> I wanted to work a bit on those patches, but never found the time to do
>  that. The best is to commit them as they are know, as they are already
>  an improvement. They can be improved later.

Maybe, though I'd hate to update the OpenBIOS images just after the release.

I think there was also some doubt whether the configuration device is
suitable for kernel/initrd stuff.