[Qemu-devel] Re: [OpenBIOS] QEMU OpenBIOS booting?

[Steven Noonan <steven@uplinklabs.net>]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber@web.de> wrote:
>
> Am 19.04.2009 um 09:50 schrieb Steven Noonan:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Steven Noonan <steven@uplinklabs.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 1:39 AM, Laurent Vivier <Laurent@lvivier.info>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> OpenBIOS is not able to boot MacOS X.
>>>
>>> Well, that's a silly limitation. Is there a reason this isn't
>>> implemented? I see that the Mac-on-Linux OpenBIOS version has such
>>> support, so it seems strange that the QEMU version does not.
>>
>> I don't know if anyone here is actually interested (this list seems
>> -very- quiet), but...
>>
>> I've been hacking at OpenBIOS for a bit, and I got it to properly read
>> Mac OS X discs (it kept failing because it would hit an Apple
>> Partition Map header instead of an HFS+ filesystem header). I'm
>> working on adding an XCOFF loader, too, so it should be able to boot
>> Mac OS X soon.
>>
>> Any chances I could get these changes merged to the main OpenBIOS tree
>> once they're done?
>>
>> My current working repository is at http://github.com/tycho/openbios.
>> I'm working on the macosx-boot branch. The relevant commit is here
>> (patch also attached):
>>
>> http://github.com/tycho/openbios/commit/4722c8a01d186a08183de49759dc8b7b74cf41c9
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> Your work surely sounds interesting. However, making OpenBIOS boot from the
> disks is not everything there is to it. Alexander Graf had once posted a
> series of patches for making Mac OS X boot in QEMU, including
> changes/additions to device emulation. They were not merged, not sure about
> the status today.
>
> One issue iirc was that you need to obtain some Apple ID from a real Mac of
> yours and pass that to QEMU for it to work.

Ah, thanks for that tip. I was completely oblivious to his work. But
from the looks of it, his work is x86-oriented. My intent was to get
the PowerPC version of Mac OS X running, which will probably be a bit
easier, particularly since QEMU already emulates the appropriate
hardware (g3bw, mac99). It's just a matter of getting OpenBIOS to boot
it, I think.

I was originally hacking PearPC into working order, and was going to
optimize it, but PearPC's code base is an absolute mess. It contains a
ridiculous number of horrible hacks, a very disorganized tree, and
it's slower than glacial movement. I eventually decided it made more
sense to get QEMU working instead. I did notice that the pre-OpenBIOS
version of QEMU was able to boot Mac OS X via Open Hack'Ware, so I was
annoyed to find that OpenBIOS didn't have such support. So, I might as
well add it.