[OpenBIOS] QEMU OpenBIOS booting?

[Steven Noonan]

Hi folks,

I've been trying to use OpenBIOS with QEMU, and I've had trouble
getting it to boot any PowerPC-based OS discs (Linux, Mac OS X, etc).
OpenBIOS just doesn't seem to find anything bootable. If I try booting
QEMU with -nographic, I get this output (I get the same with a
self-built openbios-qemu.elf from the OpenBIOS SVN as well):

---- snip ----

>> =============================================================
>> OpenBIOS 1.0 [Apr 12 2009 00:55]
>> Configuration device id QEMU version 1 machine id 1
>> CPUs: 1
>> Memory: 128M
>> UUID: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
>> CPU type PowerPC,970FX
Welcome to OpenBIOS v1.0 built on Apr 12 2009 00:55

>> ELF - yaboot_startup: Entering boot, no path
>> ELF - try_bootinfo: Trying hd:0,ppc\bootinfo.txt
>> ELF - try_bootinfo: Can't open hd:0,ppc\bootinfo.txt
>> ELF - try_path: Trying hd:2,\ofclient
>> ELF - try_path: Can't open hd:2,\ofclient
>> ELF - try_path: Trying hd:2,\yaboot conf=hd:2,\yaboot.conf
>> ELF - try_path: Can't open hd:2,\yaboot
>> *** Boot failure! No secondary bootloader specified ***

---- snip ----

Laurent Vivier suggested in this conversation in February
(http://lists.openbios.org/pipermail/openbios/2009-February/003476.html)
that there could be a bug in partition map decoding. Has such a bug
been confirmed? I was trying to find the bug myself (I am an
experienced C/C++ programmer), but the bug seems to be subtle, and my
lack of familiarity with the code base doesn't help much.

I've been trying to figure this out for 7 hours straight now... Any
advice or other help would be much appreciated!

- Steven