Today we don't run any firmware on our e500 platform. You're either running a Linux kernel directly through -kernel or you don't boot the VM at all.
This is bad for multiple reasons. The normal firmware on e500 based systems is u-boot. Some OSes (IIRC FreeBSD) rely on u-boot for their 2nd stage boot loader. Since that relies on interfaces u-boot provides we can't execute it today. The other case where we're falling short of expectations that I'm aware of is network boot. With a firmware you can actually pxe boot a virtual machine. This patch set implements all the pieces necessary to run u-boot as the firmware for our e500 platforms: mpc8544ds and e500plat. It is based on a u-boot patch set that I sent out earlier today and that is still pending review. Please try out as many things as you're able to try. If you want to revert back the the old behavior of loading a kernel directly all you need to do is pass -kernel $uImage -bios $uImage to QEMU on the command line. That will run the kernel as ePAPR compliant firmware instead. Known missing bits: - -boot doesn't get interpreted yet - pflash is missing, so the environment is volatile - no block drivers available (ata_piix is broken in u-boot and virtio-blk is missing) - KVM is still missing a few emulation bits to support this Alex Alexander Graf (10): PPC: Make all e500 CPUs SVR aware PPC: Add definitions for GIVORs PPC: Add stub emulation for HDBCR0 PPC: Add L1CFG1 SPR emulation PPC: Properly emulate L1CSR0 and L1CSR1 PPC: Add dcbtls emulation PPC: guts: Add emulation of a few more registers PPC: e500: Expose kernel load address in dt PPC: Add u-boot firmware for e500 PPC: e500: Move to u-boot as firmware hw/ppc/e500.c | 116 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------- hw/ppc/mpc8544_guts.c | 12 +++++ pc-bios/u-boot.e500 | Bin 0 -> 1049524 bytes target-ppc/cpu-models.c | 28 +++++------ target-ppc/cpu.h | 20 ++++++++ target-ppc/translate.c | 12 +++++ target-ppc/translate_init.c | 26 ++++++++-- 7 files changed, 154 insertions(+), 60 deletions(-) create mode 100755 pc-bios/u-boot.e500 -- 1.8.1.4