[OpenBIOS] [PATCH] PPC: Add "real" CPU timebase-frequency override NVRAM variable

[Alexander Graf]

On 29.06.2013, at 15:14, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:

> On 29/06/13 14:04, Alexander Graf wrote:
> 
>> Am 29.06.2013 um 13:27 schrieb Mark Cave-Ayland<mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk>:
>> 
>>> Some older OS (particularly Darwin) will get stuck in a timing loop upon
>>> boot if the CPU clock-frequency and timebase-frequency aren't set close
>>> enough to "real" values.
>>> 
>>> The clock-frequency property is already fairly realistic, so create a new
>>> boolean NVRAM variable "force-real-tbfreq?" which when set to true will
>>> override the timebase-frequency value supplied by QEMU/KVM with that similar
>>> to a real Mac.
>>> 
>>> Hence it is possible to boot these old OS from QEMU by adding the following
>>> to the QEMU command line: -prom-env 'force-real-tbfreq?=true' (although of
>>> course the guest timing may be inaccurate).
>>> 
>>> Signed-off-by: Mark Cave-Ayland<mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk>
>>> CC: Alexander Graf<agraf at csgraf.de>
>> 
>> I think I'd prefer a QEMU option to modify the timebase for real. That would change the emulated frequency as well as the one it exposes to OpenBIOS.
> 
> Hmmm okay - that's something that's reasonably beyond my level of QEMU knowledge to do at the moment :/  Although I have seen that some patches for throttling QEMU in the past have been rejected...

The throttling is already in place :). Check out cpu_ppc_tb_init() in hw/ppc/ppc.c. Actually it almost looks like the only thing we're doing wrong is the exported tbfreq value...

hw/ppc/mac_oldworld.c:        cpu_ppc_tb_init(env,  16600000UL);
hw/ppc/mac_newworld.c:        cpu_ppc_tb_init(env, 100UL * 1000UL * 1000UL);


Alex