On 06.04.2013, at 22:07, Edgar E. Iglesias wrote: > On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 01:38:52PM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote: >> >> On 06.04.2013, at 13:27, Peter Maydell wrote: >> >>> On 6 April 2013 10:07, Alexander Graf <ag...@suse.de> wrote: >>>> On ARM, look at highbank. Because we're not running we're lacking >>>> a monitor mode blob that provides sys calls for flushing caches. >>>> Thus today the highbank machine doesn't boot anymore with Linux. >>>> If we ran firmware like the real board, that would provide for the >>>> sys call. >>> >>> We also flat out don't implement enough monitor mode to allow >>> a hypothetical firmware blob to work. >> >> Why don't we implement enough monitor mode? Because we're not running >> firmware :). It's a chicken and egg thing. Bottom line is that Linux validly >> expects that firmware exists. If we don't run firmware, we diverge, thus we >> potentially break. > > > Hi guys, A question - For linux kernels that depend on preivous stages to > setup > HW state. What is the prefered way to handle it? > > In particular, if the boot loader chain depends on for example a boot rom > that is not Open Source. Is providing a QEMU specific loader in pc-bios/ a > good > option?
That's pretty much what we do for all PPC machines that do execute firmware, yes :). Just make sure to license your own firmware code under an open source license. Alex
