Re: [Qemu-ppc] Status of MacOS boot support

[Programmingkid]

On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:29 PM, Vincent Habchi wrote:

> Hi Folks (und Hallo also ;))
> 
>> You can always give mac-on-Linux a try if you have a real PowerPC around. It 
>> also uses (a hacked up version of) OpenBIOS, but comes with its own (hacked 
>> up version of) BootX.
> 
> I have at work a PowerPC G4 MacMini I revived yesterday. I’ll upgrade it to 1 
> Gb of RAM (it has only 256 Mb) and install some basic tools like clang, and 
> then QEMU ppc. I was planning to use it as a mail relay, but if it can be of 
> any help, I can give some people access through ssh for testing. I will use 
> its younger and more powerful brother (Intel Core Duo) to handle mail.
> 
>> Yes and no. At the point things are now upstream, we are very far from 
>> hardware emulation problems. It's all firmware. But one thing at a time. 
>> Getting the firmware working is certainly the more important bit. The next 
>> step would be to fix -M mac99 to actually behave like a real Mac.
> 
> Sorry for keeping asking (surely) silly questions, but what is the culprit 
> why MacOS does not boot? What is OpenBIOS lacking?

1. Auto selecting the right partition to read the OS from.
2. get-key-map word implementation in keyboard node.
3. frame-buffer-adr is a variable that needs to be set.
4. filll word (with 3 l's) 
5. Possibly allowing division by zero.
6. A possible issue with stdout variable being set to null? 


> I naively thought that once the ROM initialization phase was over, control 
> was handed to BootX and the OpenFirmware was put aside. If I got what you say 
> right, BootX and even mach_kernel lean at least partially on the OpenFirmware?

Bootx reads a lot of the information about the hardware from Open Firmware. So 
if that information is missing or bad, booting Mac OS X will be impossible.