[OpenBIOS] sparc32 boot breakage on ppc host

[Blue Swirl]

On 4/10/09, Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber at web.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>  As mentioned on qemu-devel, sparc32 softmmu is no longer booting on OSX/ppc

I must have missed that message. I guess you mean this one:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/40767

> host. This applies to both harddisk and DVD images, all Debian Etch. It
> hangs after "Booting file ... with parameters '' Trying ..." (before "Not a
> bootable ELF image").
>
>  These are the results of my bisection:
>
>  r482 (QEMU r6962) nope
>  r479 (QEMU r6777) nope
>  1.0 (QEMU r6658 +
> 9794f74f9c1dd0fbef30ded9e5c14c28a6fa579b) nope
>  ??? (QEMU r6563 +
> 9794f74f9c1dd0fbef30ded9e5c14c28a6fa579b) nope
>  ??? (QEMU r6273 + e58ffeb322e2ef88cc23e9505366418bf793316d
> w/ --disable-aio) works
>  r237 (QEMU r5262) works
>
>  Has anyone recently been successful booting on ppc, could this be some
> endianness issue? It works fine on OpenSolaris/amd64 host.

It also works on OpenBSD/Sparc64 host, which is big endian. Linux/i386
works too, so 32 bit case is covered.

I doubt that this can be a problem in OpenBIOS, I find QEMU more
likely suspect. Can you boot any other big endian targets on PPC, for
example PPC?