Re: [Qemu-discuss] mipsel_bios.bin missing

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 at 01:54, Andrew Pennebaker
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> qemu-system-mips64el: Could not load MIPS bios 'mipsel_bios.bin'
>
> I am scratching my head why qemu offers an mips64el emulator with missing
> parts. At least other emulators like for ARM and PPC have standard packages
> for obtaining the BIOS firmware assets.

AIUI the BIOS isn't freely available and distributable, so we
can't ship it. You can either (a) find a non-free BIOS image
from somewhere (perhaps by pulling it off a real hardware board?)
or (b) tell QEMU to run a kernel directly.

> Hmm, the wiki says that this file is not even necessary. The wiki advises
> creating a BIOS file consisting of 128KiB of zeroes.

This will only work if you're not actually trying to run the
BIOS image (ie you've passed QEMU a kernel to start directly)...

> Then the wiki mentions something about using a kernel to avoid loading the
> BIOS file. Uh, I am not familiar enough with qemu to know what kind of
> kernel should be passed in. I just want to run a basic Debian mips64el
> guest.

This is fairly common for (non-x86) QEMU setups -- they're all
different (because different hardware boards differ a lot from
each other) and you need to have the right guest image to run
on them and the right command line options for what that guest
image is expecting. We tend to rely on people to write up
information on how to run particular guests like Debian on
different boards, so users can then follow a tutorial. This
is similar to the way hardware vendors provide hardware but
usually don't provide information on how to install Debian on
their hardware. (MIPS isn't my area, so I don't know if one is
particularly available for mips64el.)

thanks
-- PMM