On Tue, 20 Aug 2019, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
Yes, how the guest treats those roms is another issue. bios/efi combo
roms on x86 are not that uncommon. But I'm not sure how widespread
bios/openfirmare combo roms are used (have been used) in practice. If
I haven't heard about such BIOS/OF ROMs (which does not mean much as I
don't know much about this) but I think it's probably not widespread if
used at all. I think ROM size on cards were limited for cost reasons so
instead of trying to fit more images in one limited space vendors usually
produced separate versions for x86 and Macs with different ROM image. At
least there's a lot of info on how to convert PC cards to Mac by
reflashing ROM which would not be needed if these had support in ROM.
guests can't deal with it (and try to run a x86 emulator on the bios
image instead) it might not be the best plan to go that route.
Some clients do have BIOS emulation while also can use OF ROM like
pegasos2's SmartFirmware but I don't know how that would handle
multiplatform ROMs so it's better go the simpler way which seems to have
less problems and just set the ROM the clients are most likely to support
by machine emulation. Multiplatform ROMs are an interesting possibility
but looks like more trouble in practice than it could bring.
just not the QEMU
vgabios due to not emulating i386 specific opcodes that gcc puts in real
mode code
What does sam460ex use? Some x86emu fork? If so upgrading might help.
Xorg uses x86emu too and older versions have problems with the
gcc-generated real mode code too.
It has x86emu in roms/u-boot-sam460ex/board/ACube/bios_emulator and is
likely old version because this is from 2010/2011. (I think I've also
tried enabling the option in vgabios for x86emu fixups before but that did
not help or maybe that was with pegasos2 which does not even have firmware
sources to update, yet it's useful to test with original firmware so I'd
like to get that working eventually.) For sam460ex there's a newer,
updated firmware version from 2015 the sources of which are available from
the vendor here:
http://acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=5
but I don't know if that has newer x86emu and haven't tested if it works
with QEMU. I also had to fix bugs in the previous version to compile and
work so unless there's a good reason I don't want to spend time trying to
update sam460ex firmware. The current version works enough to boot OSes
and I don't want to start maintaining and fixing a commercial vendor's
firmware. They can support it if they want.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan