On 9/26/07, Alexander Voropay alec@nwpi.ru wrote:
vlad@comsys.ro wrote:
- QEMU malta emulation is not really complete, to put it mildly
Out of curiosity, what parts did you miss?
Like, for example, the PCI stuff. So I can use the network card.
PCI stuff in the QEMU/Malta works fine, but pseudo-bootrom does not perform PCI enumeration and leaves uninitialized PCI BARs.
Linux MIPS/Malta 2.4 can not perform PCI enumeration too. The LANCE Ethernet driver *requres* a pre-initialized BARs. The situation even worse, since current Linux 2.4 can't be even built with NEW_PCI and PCI_AUTO options at all (due to linkage error).
http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/PCI_Subsystem
There is the same PCI problem with NetBSD/evbmips and seems VxWorks/Malta.
And yes, I am aware of YAMON.
AFAIK, YAMON may runs on the MIPS hardware only, and may not be redistribuded in the source or binary form.
Anyway, YAMON binary does not work on the Qemu/Malta. The Galileo chip is far more complicated then Qemu emulation. It contains four DMA channels, four timers e.t.c. e.t.c.
I recommend to improve the Qemu Malta emulation, and make it work with 2.4 Malta kernels. (ISTR it used to work, so it shouldn't need a lot to get there.)
I'm sure that improving the Qemu Malta emulation is a very noble goal, but for people that need a working 2.4 kernel NOW, my patch could be useful. Having the QEMU target in 2.6 surely helped me.
The only thing we need is a good bootrom (BIOS) for the MIPS/Malta (Free-YAMON ;)
Someone could port OpenBIOS or LinuxBIOS to MIPS.