qemu-ppc
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [PATCH qemu v19] spapr: Implement Open Firmware client interface


From: BALATON Zoltan
Subject: Re: [PATCH qemu v19] spapr: Implement Open Firmware client interface
Date: Sat, 15 May 2021 22:19:14 +0200 (CEST)

On Thu, 22 Apr 2021, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
The PAPR platform 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.

Since the beginning, the runtime component of the firmware (RTAS) has
been implemented as a 20 byte shim which simply forwards it to
a hypercall implemented in qemu. The boot time firmware component is
SLOF - but a build that's specific to qemu, and has always needed to be
updated in sync with it. Even though we've managed to limit the amount
of runtime communication we need between qemu and SLOF, there's some,
and it has become increasingly awkward to handle as we've implemented
new features.

This implements a boot time OF client interface (CI) which is
enabled by a new "x-vof" pseries machine option (stands for "Virtual Open
Firmware). When enabled, QEMU implements the custom H_OF_CLIENT hcall
which implements Open Firmware Client Interface (OF CI). This allows
using a smaller stateless firmware which does not have to manage
the device tree.

The new "vof.bin" firmware image is included with source code under
pc-bios/. It also includes RTAS blob.

This implements a handful of CI methods just to get -kernel/-initrd
working. In particular, this implements the device tree fetching and
simple memory allocator - "claim" (an OF CI memory allocator) and updates
"/memory@0/available" to report the client about available memory.

This implements changing some device tree properties which we know how
to deal with, the rest is ignored. To allow changes, this skips
fdt_pack() when x-vof=on as not packing the blob leaves some room for
appending.

In absence of SLOF, this assigns phandles to device tree nodes to make
device tree traversing work.

When x-vof=on, this adds "/chosen" every time QEMU (re)builds a tree.

This adds basic instances support which are managed by a hash map
ihandle -> [phandle].

Before the guest started, the used memory is:
0..e60 - the initial firmware
8000..10000 - stack
400000.. - kernel
3ea0000.. - initramdisk

This OF CI does not implement "interpret".

Unlike SLOF, this does not format uninitialized nvram. Instead, this
includes a disk image with pre-formatted nvram.

With this basic support, this can only boot into kernel directly.
However this is just enough for the petitboot kernel and initradmdisk to
boot from any possible source. Note this requires reasonably recent guest
kernel with:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=df5be5be8735

The immediate benefit is much faster booting time which especially
crucial with fully emulated early CPU bring up environments. Also this
may come handy when/if GRUB-in-the-userspace sees light of the day.

This separates VOF and sPAPR in a hope that VOF bits may be reused by
other POWERPC boards which do not support pSeries.

This is coded in assumption that later on we might be adding support for
booting from QEMU backends (blockdev is the first candidate) without
devices/drivers in between as OF1275 does not require that and
it is quite easy to so.

Signed-off-by: Alexey Kardashevskiy <aik@ozlabs.ru>
---
[...]
diff --git a/hw/ppc/meson.build b/hw/ppc/meson.build
index 86d6f379d1c3..dcd2e5c80df4 100644
--- a/hw/ppc/meson.build
+++ b/hw/ppc/meson.build
@@ -28,6 +28,8 @@ ppc_ss.add(when: 'CONFIG_PSERIES', if_true: files(
  'spapr_rtas_ddw.c',
  'spapr_numa.c',
  'pef.c',
+  'spapr_vof.c',
+  'vof.c',
))
ppc_ss.add(when: 'CONFIG_SPAPR_RNG', if_true: files('spapr_rng.c'))
ppc_ss.add(when: ['CONFIG_PSERIES', 'CONFIG_LINUX'], if_true: files(

It may be better to add a new CONFIG_VOF option to compile vof.c that I can then depend on in CONFIG_PEGASOS2 instead of having to add vof.c like it's added here. (If VOF is made independent of SPAPR then it deserves to have an own config option and the machines using it can depend on that.)

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]