[coreboot] YABEL: Yet another (legacy) BIOS Emulation Layer

Pattrick Hueper phueper at hueper.net
Thu Nov 27 16:10:54 CET 2008


Hi,

for the IBM SLOF OpenFirmware used in the YDL PowerStation, i
developed a BIOS emulation Layer based on x86emu. It is successfully
initialising several VGA cards in the PowerStation.

Since the SLOF version for the PowerStation is released under a BSD
license, i tried to integrate it into coreboot-v3 and succeeded today.

It initializes the cirrus card of an unpatched qemu 0.9.1-5ubuntu3.
(much slower than vm86 but i couldnt get it to initialize with the
current x86emu)

Using coreinfo as payload, i verified, that the console is working.

I would like to know, wether you guys are interested in this code, i
think it could basically be a replacement for the current x86emu code.

Since x86emu is BSD licensed as well, i think integrating the biosemu
code into coreboot should not be a problem?

While working for IBM i also tried to initialize a UltraIDE card and
almost got it to do some UDMA reads from a disk... and a ethernet card
which started to execute the PXE stack. That code however is not
released but based on the biosemu code.

I am not sure where to go from here... i need to wait for the latest
SLOF release to appear on the developerworks website
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/pa-slof/ which has some fixes.
After that i could create a patch series or git repository for review??

Coming from a PPC background i thought about trying to get coreboot-v3
and the biosemu to run in qemu-ppc... Has anybody tried that before?
Would trying this make sense at all?

I dont currently have any hardware running coreboot, otherwise i could
maybe try to recreate the code to get other PCI cards to initialize...

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Pattrick




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