[OpenBIOS] Beginners How-To for DTS and OpenFirmware?

Michael mw at debiancrew.de
Mon Nov 21 21:07:10 CET 2016


Hello Zoltan, hey list,

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 07:15:21PM +0100, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> ...
> For forth commands I've found this page useful (not sure if this is linked
> from somewhere):
> http://www.firmworks.com/QuickRef.html

Thank you, I found this (and more) last week. The OLPC sites are the
best for me:

1: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware
2: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons
3: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cross_Compiling_Open_Firmware

> ...
> This is a bit confusing. There are multiple implementations of the IEEE
> standard (commonly referred to as Open Firmware) and one of these is also
> called Open Firmware. These are listed under Implementations on the left of
> the page at www.openfirmware.info. Another implementation used by QEMU for

Yes and I looked at them. But they are either very old or not usable for
ppc (too much work to implement a new arch).

> ...
> talking about Open Firmware: the standard or the implementation with the
> same name.

One thing is left which confuses me: In wikipedia and you say, that you
use the name "Open Firmware" (also, besides as name for a standard) for
an implementation. OK.
But the website gives the impression (and G 3 says), that the implementation
has the name "OpenBIOS"...
So I have two statements which don't fit well. Please remember that I am
new to this and did not live through the history.

> ...
> Actually running OpenBIOS on real hardware is not something that is well
> tested (I'm not sure if it was ever tried but I think it wasn't done
> recently) so if you try to do that be prepared for likely needing some

The OLPC project did it, e.g.

> fixing. This is true for any implementation that does not support the
> hardware you want to run it on, then you likely need to port it.

That there will be the need for porting was clear.

> ...
> it's enough to have the basics in there. Not sure how much up to date is
> this but this is discussed in the kernel documentation here:
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/devicetree/booting-without-of.txt
>

Thank you, I missed this source.

> As for giving the device tree to OpenBIOS I think it should just know it or
> construct it from discovering the hardware as the point of the device tree
> is to describe the hardware for the operating system so the firmware should
> know the hardware and provide the device tree. It does not get it from

The "firmware" is our handmade init-assemblercode. It has to enable the
machine (beginning from Adam...) to run C-code in its RAM.

If there is no software-interface, then we provide the device-tree maybe in
forth or in a blob. Just thinking loudly.

> ...
> In fact OpenBIOS does not have that many drivers but maybe the basics are
> there, only the platform specific init code might need to be adapted for a

That would be very nice. We give it a try. Maybe with help from you / the
list.

> new board. For ppc these would be in arch/ppc. Running on QEMU is quite a
> bit simpler as we can skip a lot of init code (such as memory controller or
> other hardware) so maybe these are not well implemented or buggy as they
> were not tested with real hardware for a while.
> ...

Did you use OpenBIOS in a recent qemu and have you been able to remote-debug
it there? I was able to load and run the old OpenBIOS code (from svn repo)
on "qemu-system-ppc".

Thank you for your time and suggestions, greetings,
Michael



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