I doubt qemu or pearPC will be useful based on current port. but one approach that worth to try:
The current port uses a virtual firmware; create a bootable binary of VOF and let qemu-ppc boot from that, and it will bring the OF prompt (hopefully), and from there solaris kernel can be loaded and booted. but there probably lots of device issues here and it may turn out not worth to go this way. On 11/6/07, Martin Bochnig <mb1x at gmx.com> wrote: > Yonghong Yan wrote: > > Hi Tom, > > > > how are you doing! > > > > I have been considering qemu at the very begining before having an > > ODW, or even before having an Mac. The difficult part of qemu is that > > you cannot get to OF prompt to use those net boot OF command. The OF > > is built in the qemu binary. as I can recall, that feature would not > > come really soon. hopefully i am wrong now. > > > > Noah > > > > No, you are right, unfortunately. > qemus non-x86/x64 emulation targets (eg. sparc, ppc, mips, arm) are > pretty incomplete. They are mostly designed to somehow get a linux > kernel running. > There is a more complete ppc emulator, PearPC > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PearPC , but when I last tried it it hasnt > been complete enough either, in terms of whether it could ever be useful > to serve as sort of reference platform for Polaris, being cheap (zero > cost) and available virtually everywhere (in contrast to the PegasosII, > ODW et al). > > Even if somebody ported qemu-system-ppc to be based on > http://openbios.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS (designed after IEEE1275-1994), > then it would still be a bad idea, as you never knew which > bug/hurdle/stopper would be caused by Polaris versus qemu versus openbios. > Take the qemu-system-sparc emulation target, for example: It is even > based on openbios for over a year now, bus still unable to boot any > Solaris 2.x or SunOS4.x kernel. > > It is out of the question for the desired purpose, except somebody > invests many millions into it (if not billions). > The Polaris port has to happen in a stable, reliable, typical > configuration, that is totally predictable: Real hardware, or an > emulator that would be complete (which doesnt exist for ppc). > There is some emulation software on ibm.com, but it doesnt suit our > purpose at all. > > Martin > > > On 11/6/07, Tom Riddle <tom.riddle at sun.com> wrote: > > > >> After some thought and discussions with others here QEMU may just be a > >> good intermediate solution for the project. There are a number of > >> development areas that could be done and tested in an emulation > >> environment like this. Does anyone have any hands on experience with QEMU? > >> > >> > >> This message posted from opensolaris.org > >> _______________________________________________ > >> powerpc-discuss mailing list > >> powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org > >> > >> > > _______________________________________________ > > powerpc-discuss mailing list > > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org > > > > > >
