Re: [Qemu-devel] [Patch] Ali Chipset support for PC [+ questions about alpha-softmmu target]

[Tristan Gingold]

> > > * What state is the alpha cpu emulation in, and what's the best  
> > > way to
> > > test it?
> >
> > Still beta.  It was not maintained nor tested for a while.  And bugs
> > were recently found.
>
> Anything that I can do to help?  I worked on es40 (mostly pc-style
> hardware stuff) so if I can help I'd like to.

A simple printf("Hello world\n") program compiled on linux now works  
on qemu (patches
pending).  So the cpu emulation is not that bad.  There are still a  
lot to check (FPU,
overflow) but they are less frequently used.

> > > * Looking over some of the softmmu targets, it looks like the  
> > > bulk of
> > > target work (after the cpu emulation, of course) is just  
> > > attaching all
> > > of the devices in the right places.
> >
> > Booting might be an issue too as alpha boots from icache.
> > It looks like es40 has an IO-TLB which is not present in standard
> > PC.  I suppose Sparc64 has also
> > an IO-TLB but I didn't look further.
>
> Yeah, the icache thing will be interesting.  Looking at es40, the  
> icache
> looks like its only used during the rom decompression stage.  es40
> creates a decompressed rom file on the first run and it looks like the
> first uint64 is the PC, and the second uint64 is the PAL_BASE.  That
> should be enough to get the system up and running (after a software- 
> only
> call_pal instruction is implemented)...and it doesn't seem to mess  
> with
> the icache in that case.
>
> I may look at a standalone rom extractor, so you can give it the
> cl67srmrom.exe file and drop out a ready-to-run rom file.

So if you get the SRM decompressed from es40, you can start to work  
on the softmmu
emulation.

Tristan.