Blue Swirl wrote:
On 3/19/09, Robert Reif reif@earthlink.net wrote:
How much diagnostics support is already in OpenBIOS and what would it take to add something like sun's OBDiag.
Very little to none. If you mean something like this:
http://tracker.coreboot.org/trac/openboot/browser/obp/os/bootprom/diagmode.f...
it would mean touching a lot of places.
A simple hook for POST would be a good start. I just want a way of running some code for testing the hardware (or hardware emulation).
Has anyone ever tried running a sparc32 OpenBIOS image on real hardware?
This has been on my TODO for a long time. Standard image will fail, it probes for QEMU. But it should be possible to create a special entry.S for real hardware. There are some other places where we just use the Qemu facilities directly without probing for the real alternative, these should be fixed.
QEMU and OpenBIOS and linux are too interdependent. QEMU doesn't come close to running a real OpenBoot image because the hardware emulation isn't complete. Granted, some stuff will never be emulated properly but there is room for improvement. Running OpenBIOS on real hardware validates it much better than on QEMU because the quality of emulation factor is removed. QEMU/OpenBIOS is not capable of booting any version of solaris and some versions of bsd due to deficiencies in both.
I'm just trying to tackle these issues from any angle that improves QEMU and OpenBIOS by reducing the dependencies and number of variables by using known working code or hardware.