On Sun, 14 Nov 2021, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
On 13/11/2021 18:56, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
Please don't ignore this problem, it won't go away by itself. Since you haven't demonstrated so far that the dummy-pci patch breaks anything I assume it either works or you haven't tested it at all. If the latter then why are you so reluctant to even test it and consider it as a fix until a more complete fix you're happy with is available sometimes in the future (does not seem to happen for three years so it's not somethiung I expect until the next QEMU release). We still have a chance to fix this for QEMU 6.2 but if you don't do anything about it it will stop working for those already using MorphOS with mac99. Do you plan to do anything about this or at least please give an explanation why it can't be fixed for 6.2 if you decided it won't be fixed.
Regards, BALATON Zoltan
I'm not ignoring this problem at all: for the reasons previously mentioned in this thread I am not accepting the dummy-pci patch, and so haven't spent any time testing it. I don't see how repeating myself in this reply once again
It's a pity because I think this would be the easiest and simplest fix that would both solve the problem for now and keep everyting else working that worked before until OpenBIOS gains support for multiple PCI buses or the NetBSD folks provide some help,
will make any difference. I also stand by my offer to provide help/advice on creating the real /pci node if you are willing to investigate the NetBSD issue.
I've tried and provided the patches with the full pci node, even several versions with different amount of info including the last version that adds everything the real hardware has and also spent about a weekend with the NetBSD issue even writing to their mailing list but since this seems to be a pre-existing problem not caused by the patch only exposed by it and I don't have much free time I don't want to spend more time with this only to then you come up with another guest that has some problems and we're back where we are now. Did you test that versions of NetBSD that don't boot on QEMU now do boot on real hardware? I think that would prove the issue is there regardless of the pci patch. It probably just causes more things to be overwritten that causes breakage whereas before it only breaks non-essential stuff by chance so it still boots.
Given that MorphOS has never worked with vanilla OpenBIOS then there is no regression here to warrant breaking the soft freeze for QEMU 6.2.
It only never worked because you refused to accept any patches I've sent so far, otherwise it would have worked well since 3 years. Also fixing a bug is not breaking the freeze, that's exacly for fixing known or discovered problems so the release won't have them. The regression is that due to the serial reset changes the patched OpenBIOS I've provided until this could be upstreamed (and still used but users) is also stopped working now. I could publish another patched version but that would create confusion because it may not work with older QEMU versions and a lot of users just use whatever version comes with their binary distribution and may not know which patched OpenBIOS version to use so just give up on it if it does not work at first. Therefore I don't plan to provide another patched OpenBIOS. Either this can be fixed upstream now or people will have to stop using mac99 and migrate to pegasos2 instead which is slightly unconvenient because they may need to replace their boot partition and boot file but pegasos2 can boot the MorphOS kernel directly with -kernel and no firmware so maybe bearable. But it would still be nicer if people who have working mac99 setups would be able to continue using it with QEMU 6.2 and a simple fix is available for that (or one that meets your standards just happens to bring out an issue with some old NetBSD versions) so you could chose from not one but two solutions even if none of them perfect.
In my opinion a more perfect solution would be to use real OpenFirmware instead that would really fix all compatibilty problems. If anything I would be willing to put effort in that otherwise it's just wasted time for me. Why reimplement OpenFirmware now that it's available open source? We would only need to write the drivers for the mac hardware for it some of which may be available in the Sun version which is also open source (like escc and sungem) and I've done some work before to pass device tree from QEMU to OpenFirmware like SLOF does so maybe it's not that far away to make it work for Mac machines too. That would really fix all problems including passing through graphics cards that with OpenBIOS also need patches currently.
Regards, BALATON Zoltan