Re: [Qemu-devel] AmigaOS 4.x on QEMU

[François Revol]

On 25/01/2014 01:20, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2014, Alpha Mule wrote:
>> Hi. AmigaOS 4.x runs natively on some niche PowerPC boards. I was
>> wondering about the viability of running AmigaOS 4.x on QEMU.
>>
>> Specifically, I was wondering if there has been any development on
>> that and/or what needs to be done to get it fully working.
>>
>> Any information would be appreciated. Thanks.
> 
> Looks like not much info is available on this... I think that the first
> difficulty is that AmigaOS 4.x is not freely available (AFAIK) so it's
> hard to do any testing with it.
> 
> I've found that a demo version of MorphOS (which is not the same but
> runs on similar hardware) is available and runs on some Mac hardware
> that may be closer to what qemu already has support for so it may be an
> easier target to test.

Unlike MorphOS which supports some PPC Mac machines, AmigaOS 4.x only
supports some specific hardwares, AFAIK, like the X-1000 from A-EON, and
the Sam440 and Sam460ex boards from ACube.

I'm currently porting Haiku to the Sam460ex board, so I started adding
support for it to QEMU locally, including enough to get the custom
U-Boot to start, but it's far from finished, U-Boot still fails before
POST (something to do with enumerating RAM).

As for AmigaOS4, it uses a custom stage2 bootloader which requires some
exported functions from the specific U-Boot (why they didn't use and
extend the official U-Boot calls I don't know), so you won't be able to
boot it with -kernel anyway, unlike Haiku which stage2 loader currently
fakes a Linux kernel for non-x86 archs.

I don't know when I'll have time to clean that up and put it online yet.

François.