[U-Boot] Using qemu-system-ppc to boot U-Boot

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 03:59:48PM -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> On 03/27/2012 03:53 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> > Dear Frank,
> > 
> > In message <CADNf2sxrQFDU0LLQWp5huRGgQiKbaLik1+2C=Oj=gjORP6XacA at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm trying to figure out if anyone has ported a PPC system to QEMU
> >> that is capable of booting U-Boot. Similar to the ARM versatilepb
> >> target, but for PPC instead. I've tried the Bamboo and MPC8544DS but
> >> it seems they only use stubs to OS calls and parses a DTB for info.
> > 
> > Did you check which configurations the Yocto project are using?  They
> > provide qemu based emulations for ARM, MIPS, PPC and x86, and I would
> > be really surprised if the ARM and PPC configs were not based on
> > U-Boot ...  [ARM: beagleboard; PPC: mpc8315e-rdb; MIPS:
> > routerstationpro]
> 
> I'm not familiar with what Yocto does, but at least for Freescale PPC
> chips QEMU does not emulate enough of the hardware to run U-Boot (at
> least, not without significant U-Boot hacking that I'm not aware of
> anyone having done).  QEMU loads Linux directly.

Putting my OE-guy hat on, the qemu-ppc target used is 'mac99'.  It was
switched over from prep back in January of this year.  From my own past
diggings, there's not really a newer machine option as all of the
support added to qemu from Freescale and IBM has been kvm-oriented
rather than full machine emulation oriented.  So to run U-Boot under
qemu on a BE machine, you'd need to port U-Boot over.  Or, build the
sandbox arch on a BE host, such as Linux running under qemu-ppc.  Then
it should be BE, yes?

-- 
Tom