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

[Frank Svendsbøe]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Tom Rini <trini at ti.com> wrote:
> 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?
>

KVM would be fine if I wanted to run Linux here, but I don't... Well I
do, but my current employer don't. BE is a requirement yes. In fact,
more so than running than a PPC compatible system.

Best regards,
Frank