On 20.12.2010, at 13:19, François Revol wrote: >>>> So we certainly do need some open source firmware solution for prep to at >>>> least have Linux running. For other guests, I don't see a reason why users >>>> shouldn't try to fetch a real firmware blob separately :). >>> >>> We're not shipping any firmware for ppcemb either, so that argument seems >>> moot. OpenBIOS, SeaBIOS and ZIPL are the only ones currently. Feel free to >>> supply additional blobs for U-Boot etc. >> >> IIUC you don't need u-boot for the embedded targets. You just pass in a >> kernel and the rest is magic. > > This holds only for Linux which imposes its own startup API to bootloaders > and go with kernel drivers directly. > > Other OS like Haiku use a 2nd stage bootloader which assumes a working > callable BIOS (OF on ppc), and getting it to run on U-Boot is already tricky > on its own.
That was my point :). I'm not aware of us supporting firmware on ppcemb, so it's capable of running an OS all by itself already. > >>> Recent vanilla Linux kernels wouldn't run on PReP. So what Linux do you >>> want to run using open source firmware? >>> I certainly do not intend to write firmware for the upcoming 40p machine. >>> If Linux runs on real 40p hardware then it should run with real firmware >>> under emulation, too. QEMU is an emulation project, not a Linux testing >>> framework. >> >> I completely agree. Linux is usually easy because it's fully open source and >> supports a lot of targets. If you feel like running NetBSD or Haiku instead, >> feel free to do so. > > Thanks for thinking about Haiku ;) > > Btw there are other existing targets, like AROS, MorphOS, or AmigaOS which > uses a modified U-Boot with a 'boota' command that passes their 2nd stage > Parthenope bootloader a list of BIOS-like callbacks into U-Boot, cf. : > http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=2 > http://www.acube-systems.biz/download/u-boot-1.3.1c_20101206_prod.tar.gz > > Though they probably won't run on PReP, and PReP support in Haiku might come > only for the sake of supporting the BeBox, which had its own dumb firmware > (MAME seems to have some emulation support for BeBox). > > OTOH, I've been thinking about adding a Sam440 target, but it'd still require > the custom U-Boot to start AmigaOS for example. I'd call U-Boot the firmware that we can ship with Qemu then because it's open source :). I'm not advocate for openBIOS. If it works, great. If something else works better, let's take that. The only thing I really want to see is a target that does something useful. That's it :). A target that loads proprietary firmware halfway through is not valuable to users IMHO. A target that loads proprietary firmware and boots an OS is valuable. A target that doesn't need firmware and loads an OS is valuable. Maybe a target that doesn't boot an OS quite yet, but loads open source firmware pretty well is valuable too. Alex