Re: Feature Suggestion

[BALATON Zoltan]

Hello,

On Sat, 30 Sep 2023, Parker Duval wrote:
> Hello, I have feature suggestions for the PowerPC part of QEMU.  The 
> first feature I suggest is a G5 machine in the ppc64 portion to emulate 
> the PowerMacG5.

The mac99 machine (quite unintuituvely) emulates several PowerMac like 
machines depending on how it's used. With qemu-system-ppc -machine mac99 
it emulates a G4 PowerMac3.1 which is the most tested emulation and can 
run at least Linux, MacOS X and MorphOS. When used as qenu-system-ppc64 
-machine mac99 it emulates a G5 Mac but likely not enough to boot MacOS X 
only ppc64 Linux. I had patches before to split this to use different 
-machine options to avoid this confusion but there was no agreement on how 
to name these machines so these patches were dropped. To be ab;e to run 
64bit MacOS X one would need to find out what is missing from the G5 mac99 
emulation and fix that. It may either be defficiencies in OpenBIOS which 
currently installs a device tree saying PoweMac3.1 even when run with G5 
which likely confuses OSes that depend on the device tree or some missing 
hardware emulation that MacOS X may require.

>  Another feature I’d like to see on qemu is the older 
> mac machines being able to emulate.  With those systems you can emulate 
> Mac OS 8 which you can’t in qemu right now.

These older MacOS versions need the original Apple ROM of the machine 
which currently does not run on PowerMac emulation because it needs some 
hardware features that's not yet emulated. I could get the G3 beige ROM to 
start and get to OF prompt but not boot into MacOS yet, but even that 
needs the sound part finished that's not yet completed and merged in QEMU 
and once that's done some more patches are needed to make it work. As 
Howard said you should be able to run MacOS 7.1-8.1 soon with the m68k 
q800 machine, maybe in next QEMU release, the last set of changes needed 
for that are being merged currently as far as I understand.

> Those are the features I hope to see in QEMU.  I hope they will be able 
> to be put in.

That's not how it works unfortunately. It takes somebody to do the work 
and make it happen. Patches don't appear magically but somebody has to do 
testing to figure out what's needed and write the changes, then submit 
them for inclusion here and get through review. If you want these features 
then do it yourself or find people who want to do it.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan