[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS and ppc64?

Andreas Färber andreas.faerber at web.de
Thu Sep 30 19:02:57 CEST 2010


Hello,

I'm investigating the idea of a new QEMU chrp machine derived from  
mac99. The background is that there are ofmem issues when running  
Haiku on the g3beige machine, whereas running AIX on mac99 fails with  
the fix in place that makes Haiku go further. I assume this is due to  
differences in memory layout so that I need to move OpenBIOS to  
another location in RAM and anything else that clobbers the memory  
locations AIX assumes to be able to claim for itself.

Not having (low-level) access to an IBM Power System / System p /  
pSeries, the best source I could find was a JS20 device tree [1].  
(Some older RS/6000 ones for comparison are available at [2].)

Interestingly the nvram is at 0x00000100ff800000 and pci at  
0x08000000f8000000, i.e. above 32-bit address space. With  
sizeof(void*) == 4, drivers/macio.c:nvram is unable to save and access  
such an address.

ofmem cannot deal with 64-bit virtual/physical addresses either, since  
it uses 32-bit ucell in translation_t and range_t. The MMU  
translations on mac99 don't match Apple's OpenFirmware on my G5 size- 
wise.

What's the plan for fixing this? Will we need an openbios-ppc64 after  
all, or is there a way to fix these issues in openbios-ppc using  
uint64_t and some assembler magic? The 970 init (arch/ppc/qemu/ 
init.c:ppc64_patch_handlers) apparently does something clever for the  
interrupt handlers and seems able to use 64-bit ld/std instructions in  
start.S. That still wouldn't help with ucell based structs and C  
functions of course...

Regards,

Andreas

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=73270
[2] http://www.tibit.org/ppc/




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