[OpenBIOS] [PATCH 0/4] Add virtio-blk driver support

[Jd Lyons]

> On Oct 17, 2018, at 5:05 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 17/10/2018 16:28, Jd Lyons via OpenBIOS wrote:
> 
>> That’s pretty cool Mark, is the virtue-blk driver only good for CDROM image files, or can we use it on HD images as well.
>> 
>> I gave it a go with a Mac OS 9 image file, and was able to boot over the Trampoline into the Mac OS Nano Kernel, but it couldn’t find the System Folder, so booting halted with the ? Icon.
>> 
>> Not surprising, I think we would need a Openbios based ’NDRV’ for the virtio-blk device.
> 
> Yeah that's just about it - since the native OS doesn't have a virtio-blk-pci driver
> then someone would need to write an NDRV similar to the way in which Ben wrote the
> QEMU VGA driver. Don't suppose you know anyone with any MacOS 9 development
> experience who might be interested?
> 
>> Booting the Trampoline was much faster with this driver, at least 2-3x.
> 
> Glad that you found it useful :)
> 
> 
> ATB,
> 
> Mark.

Unfortunately Apple’s documentation on ‘NDRV’s is next to useless, tho there is some code for a SCSI disk driver in the PCI DDK 3.0. so that’s something.

I’ve hacked together some video card ‘NDRV’s for Radeon chips used in Mac’s that didn’t natively support OS 9, but I had the code from OS X to work with.

I know some skilled coders for the classic Mac OS, so maybe one day we can get something like this going. I know there was some effort to get a virtio driver for OS X, so maybe someone has that code around.