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Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:13:35 -0800
From: Peter Grehan <grehan@freebsd.org>
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To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>
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Cc: powerpc@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Best way to run in emulation
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Hi Warner,

> Is there a good way to run FreeBSD/powerpc of some flavor in an
> emulator?  I know that we can't boot the iso's, but is there some way
> to build things such that we can boot it in qemu and/or gxemul?

  The GENERIC kernel used to boot in gdb's powerpc simulator, psim, and 
will with some minor changes (that I need to submit).

  I use psim extensively to debug low-level code, and it's useful for 
machine-independent code as well. Most recently, I used it to make sure 
ULE would work.

  Gxemul's OpenFirmware implementation runs in real-mode ala pre '99 
Apple hardware. The FreeBSD loader and kernel don't deal with this, 
though they could with some effort.

  Not sure about Qemu - haven't tried that for a while though from 
memory it had the same issue

  At one stage I had a large patch-set for PearPC (v2) that would allow 
FreeBSD to boot from CD, but that project seemed to die after a 
promising start.

later,

Peter.