On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:19 PM, Nick Couchman <nick.couch...@seakr.com> wrote: >>>> On 2009/10/21 at 13:06, Blue Swirl <blauwir...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Nick Couchman <nick.couch...@seakr.com> >> wrote: >>> I have a couple of questions regarding sparc64 softmmu support in Qemu: >>> - Is this part of Qemu being actively developed? Judging by the commits to >> the git repo, it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of focus on >> development of this right now? >> >> It's more active architecture than many others, but of course x86 is the >> king. >> >>> - Does anyone know what's left to be done for the sparc64 target to get it >> to boot Solaris correctly? Is there any sort of a bug repository for Qemu >> that might list these things? Or maybe someone has a list in their head? >> >> There are several areas which need improvement. Sparc64 CPU emulation >> seems to be mostly OK. Sun4u devices are a bit bogus and sun4v devices >> do not exist yet. The Forth side of OpenBIOS is buggy, but we don't >> have enough Forth experts. >> >>> - As has already been mentioned on this list, Sun has released the Open Boot >> PROM code (at least the sun4v version of it) under the BSD and GPL licenses. >> What would it take to get Qemu to use the OBP code instead of OpenBIOS? >> Looks like the OBP output isn't really an executable, and it seems like >> sparc64-softmmu will only load Sparc ELF binaries for the BIOS. >> >> The hypervisor code below OBP is targeting Sun's Legion simulator, not >> ours or even native host. >> >> For Solaris/Sparc64 emulation, there is more than one way: >> - sparc64-softmmu/sun4u + OpenBIOS (default stack): problems described above >> - sparc64-softmmu/sun4v + hypervisor + OBP: need to port the >> hypervisor to QEMU, maybe fix/implement a few devices >> - sparc64-solaris-user or sparc32plus-solaris-user (I sent a first cut >> patch to list some time ago): the licenses are incompatible and the >> user emulator would not be as useful as full system emulator. > > Thanks for the updates. I didn't realize that the OBP was written > specifically for the emulator - I thought it was a standard PROM code. Would > there be any use in borrowing code from the OpenSPARC OBP source and porting > that over to OpenBIOS? Maybe that's just one of the things waiting on a > Forth expert? Or are their licensing issues there that would make such a > task legally challenging?
I think the license are compatible, but only the Forth expert can say whether it would make sense. There are some other Forth boot prom sources in http://www.openfirmware.info/. > For the devices, the sun4u platform is PCI-based, correct? I assume, then, > that peripheral devices, like network cards, video cards, etc., are shared > from the rest of the Qemu code base? What devices are lacking? Yes, PCI devices should be fine. There's a TODO list under target-sparc, not all items in the list are critical though. > I'd also love to see a sparc64-solaris-user application - mainly, I'm > interested in some sort of application that will let me run my legacy > Solaris/SPARC application on Linux/x86(_64). We were using a product called > Transitive for that for a while, but IBM recently acquired Transitive and has > decided to bury the technology in one of their products and not offer it as a > stand-alone application anymore. So, I'm looking for alternatives. Do you > still have those patches? What's incompatible about the licensing? The patch and some discussion can be found here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-04/msg00824.html