Re: VW ELF loader

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 03/02/20 02:28, David Gibson wrote:
> But "pseries" is different.  We're implementing the PAPR platform,
> which describes an OS environment that's presented by a combination of
> a hypervisor and firmware.  The features it specifies *require*
> collaboration between the firmware and the hypervisor.

Which features are these?

> So really, the question isn't whether we implement things in firmware
> or in qemu.  It's whether we implement the firmware functionality as
> guest cpu code, which needs to be coded to work with a limited
> environment, built with a special toolchain, then emulated with TCG.
> Or, do we just implement it in normal C code, with a full C library,
> and existing device and backend abstractions inside qemu.

... which is adding almost 2000 lines of new code to the host despite
the following limitations:

> 4. no networking in OF CI at all;
> 5. no vga;
> 6. no disk partitions in CI, i.e. no commas to select a partition -
> this relies on a bootloader accessing the disk as a whole;

and of course:

> 7. "interpret" (executes passed forth expression) does nothing as in this
> environment grub only uses it for switching cursor off and similar tasks.

In other words you're not dropping SLOF, you're really dropping
OpenFirmware completely.  It's little more than what ARM does.

Paolo