The correct place for these questions would be the OpenBIOS list (blatantly cross-posted).
On 7/30/07, Andreas Färber andreas.faerber@web.de wrote:
Am 19.07.2007 um 09:23 schrieb Natalia Portillo:
El jue, 19-07-2007 a las 00:46 +0200, Andreas Färber escribió:
Am 18.07.2007 um 18:26 schrieb Blue Swirl:
It looks like open hack'ware is pretty much stalled, so its hard telling what progress will be made futurewise.
Might it be possible to replace it with OpenBIOS?
Sure, and as both are GPL useful, code can be shared. But some PPC developers are needed. It may still be easier to fix the OHW bugs than start over anew.
Not sure I understand... I thought Open Firmware was based on platform independent Forth code? I'm running on ppc64 and could try to compile something under Linux in case that's the problem.
Yes, OF is basically a Forth-interpreter. Of course this Forth-interpreter is in C and compile to machine code :p
Yes, that is obvious. Not so obvious was what ppc *developers* were needed for. I got the other answer afterwards saying that HFS etc. support needed to be added.
Try to compile OpenBIOS under Linux/PPC (using 32bit compiler, not ppc64) and comment us.
I tried SVN HEAD of both fcode-utils and openbios-devel.
OpenBIOS supposedly has support for ppc and cross-ppc archs but that is not true. It currently only has support for cross-ppc (for the old PearPC emulator it seems). I copied these files as ppc_config.xml and ppc_rules.xml respectively to get the ppc target, in ppc_rules.xml changed the tool names to use the standard gcc etc. and was able to compile okay. Products based on this unmodified configuration were among others an openbios-pearpc.elf file - I thus changed ppc_rom.bin in some ppc files to this filename. Launching qemu-system-sparc -boot d -cdrom /dev/cdrom with a Debian Etch DVD inserted resulted in an opcode error. My guess thus is that this OpenBIOS file is not suited for qemu in that configuration?
Some observations that might be of interest:
- OpenBIOS has support for some (not all) PowerPC processors
according to some Readme
- it specifically mentions ppc/AIX and has some apparent IBM
contributions despite the missing ppc target
- the cross-ppc config mentions HFS and HFSP which I guess refer to
HFS and HFS+ filesystems respectively (HFS was set to false, HFSP to true)
Maybe someone can shed some more light on what exactly needs to be changed config-wise or is missing in OpenBIOS or qemu in order to boot AIX 6 or any Linux.
Andreas