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

[Joseph Smith]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:10:54 +0100, "Pattrick Hueper" <phueper at hueper.net>
wrote:
> 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?
> 
Very very cool Patrick. If it has a BSD license it should be no problem for
coreboot. I say the more payloads the better :-)

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org