[OpenBIOS] openfirmware boot partition layout

[Dinar Valeev]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> wrote:
> On 15/02/11 14:09, Dinar Valeev wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm playing with kvm on powerpc (I have LPAR'ed IBM Power5 machine).
>>
>> I have a couple of disk images which are working perfectly. (I've
>> tested it by deploying it using VIO server with usual dd command
>> directly to LPAR disk)
>>
>> But when I'm trying to attach same image as qemu (with KVM enabled)
>> disk. VM won't boot. It just stuck on openbios banner.
>
> Okay - first question to ask is this: which version of KVM and which SVN
> revision of OpenBIOS are you using? There has a been a lot of work in this
> area last year for example.

I'm using kvm with 2.6.38-rc3-67365-g7a67422 kernel

mine qemu version is:
QEMU emulator version 0.14.50, Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

I believe this is most recent version.

>
> Note that you can get more debugging output from OpenBIOS if you load up KVM
> with a couple of extra options on the command line: -nographic
> -prom-env='auto-boot?=false'. This will enable you to see the debug output,
> and also drops you to the Forth command prompt rather than trying to boot
> the device automatically.
>
> You can then try manually booting a PPC partition, e.g.
>
> boot cdrom:1
> boot disk:2
> boot
>
> etc.
>
> Or even browse some of the filesystem contents to see if the FS is
> recognised:
>
> dir cdrom:1\
> dir disk:2\

My qemu command is:
./ppc64-softmmu/qemu-system-ppc64 -enable-kvm -drive
file=/root/k0daz_ppc_lvm_appliance.ppc64-1.0.1.raw -cpu power4
-nographic -prom-env 'auto-boot?=false'

Once I'm in OF prompt I've tried to invoke:
0 > dir disk:1\ pc-parts: Unable to determine filesystem
 ok

If I'm trying to boot VM with one you proposed. VM just hangs.

>> I have another image with old mac partition table (which is working under
>> qemu)
>>
>> So I have actually two questions:
>> 1) Is booting from PReP partition (type 0x41) is supported? (PReP just
>> consists raw copy of yaboot binary)
>>
>> 2) When VM have LVM root then it required to have FAT partition (type
>> 0x06) with kernel, initrd, yaboot and its config.
>> Does this scenario supported as well?
>>
>> Here is usual partition setups I have:
>> non lvm setup:
>> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
>>  1      32.3kB  8225kB  8193kB  primary               boot, , , , , ,
>> , , , type=41, prep,
>>  2      8225kB  897MB   888MB   primary  ext3         , , , , , , , ,
>> , type=83, ,
>>
>> lvm setup:
>> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
>>  1      32.3kB  49.4MB  49.3MB  primary  fat16        boot, , , , , ,
>> , , , type=06, ,
>>  2      49.4MB  979MB   929MB   primary               , , , , , lvm, ,
>> , , type=8e, ,
>>
>> I'll glad to provide additional information or participate in testing
>> in the future.
>
> Andreas is the person most likely to know the current status of PPC support.
Andreas, have you tried such scenarios?

>
> HTH,
>
> Mark.
>
> --
> Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
> PostgreSQL - PostGIS
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>
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