Re: [Qemu-devel] AIX emulated on x86 host

[glen . c . bodie]

Andreas - it sounds like an interesting development project, but I'm going 
to have to decline. The amount of effort to get my application running on 
AIX emulated under QEMU seems to be greater than the effort we were hoping 
to avoid in the first case by porting the code to Windows. TNSTAAFL, 
thanks.

Regards - Glen

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Am 28.10.2010 um 22:14 schrieb Alexander Graf:

> On 28.10.2010, at 08:42, Natalia Portillo wrote:
>
>> The last thing I've heard about that was long time ago when I and 
>> Jocelyn tried to make it work with OpenHackWare to no luck.
>>
>> Anyway, right now, it does not work either, I just don't know if 
>> anyone is working on it.
>
> FWIW, Andreas Färber is working on it. Those efforts are really just 
> at the beginning though, so don't expect to see anything soon.

There are three main issues currently:
1) QEMU doesn't emulate a machine that would run current versions of 
   AIX in reality.
2) We don't have a true ppc64 OpenBIOS, just some ppc64 support in the 
   32-bit version.
3) RTAS is just a stub in OpenBIOS, it doesn't even signal an error 
   when used.

What I am working on:
* ppc64 compatibility of OpenBIOS code, i.e. getting things compiled 
  at all
* 32-bit RTAS binary with minimal functionality
* a ppc64-softmmu chrp machine and accompanying differentiations in 
  OpenBIOS

I occasionally push my WIP to:
http://repo.or.cz/w/qemu/afaerber.git - aix branch
http://repo.or.cz/w/openbios/afaerber.git - ppc branch

How you could help:
* Provide us with device trees from real AIX-capable CHRP machines 
  that we can model memory layout and OF tree from. Additionally, any 
  info on what devices/chipsets we would need to emulate would be 
  helpful. (I'm currently basing things on mac99 emulation in lack 
  thereof.)
* Subscribe to the OpenBIOS mailing list [1] and review and test our 
  ppc64 patches.
* Any advice on how to get GCC 4.3+ powerpc64-linux cross-compilers 
  built [2] would be appreciated. We could then better rule out compiler 
  bugs.
* You might try making the ppc-softmmu PReP emulation work with 
  OpenBIOS and check if that would be supported by AIX 5. Massimo 
  Montecchi inquired about that but didn't post any patches since then; 
  you could try contacting him. If PReP were supported by AIX 5, it 
  would still require RTAS support in OpenBIOS though.

Regards,
Andreas

[1] http://www.openfirmware.info/mailman/listinfo/openbios
[2] http://lists.openbios.org/pipermail/openbios/2010-October/005343.html

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