[OpenBIOS] PReP PowerPC "emulation"

[Alexander Graf]

On 15.09.2010, at 21:18, Andreas Färber wrote:

> Massimo,
> 
> Am 15.09.2010 um 20:06 schrieb Massimo Montecchi:
> 
>> can you suggest me where to find the code for "PReP"?
>> AIX needs PReP emulation to works!!!!!
> 
> I was serious when I suggested you could *contribute* PReP support to OpenBIOS!
> 
> Currently only the g3beige and mac99 machines are somewhat supported. QEMU did not use OpenBIOS for ppc before, so the QEMU-specific ppc parts are still quite new and there will not be much code for PReP yet. Part of the problem was that the Linux kernel dropped support for PReP machines, so I am less certain whether PReP emulation is the only way to run AIX in QEMU. Maybe some new non-PReP machine with a hardware configuration different from Macs would do, too?

AFAIK the PowerStation can run recent AIX versions. And that is a CHRP machine.

> For PReP you will definitely need to patch QEMU's hw/ppc_prep.c code to properly load the openbios-ppc file (fixing the current error message), and OpenBIOS must probably react to the machine type in, e.g., arch/ppc/qemu/init.c and behave differently from New World Macs where necessary (cf. ARCH_PREP).

Exactly. It's a lot of work. If you want to go through all of it, I'm happy to look through the patches. I don't believe it's worth it though. AIX should be fine with CHRP platforms.


Alex