Hi BALATON, thank you very much for this insightful answer. I guess so far this has been the only information that somehow confirms it would work.
So far i have tried passing through PCI as well as SCSI. I orientated myself by the guides i found on passing through PCI and PCIe devices. But i found nothing PPC related. Only Windows stuff. However what i can tell is, because i own old PPC Macs, that there has been quite a bunch of third party SCSI host adapters around that actually do work in OS9. Most of them i own myself. The most common cards with good driver support were: -Atto ExpressPCI -Formac ProRaid -Adaptec 2906 -Adaptec 2930CU The Atto and Formac even come with native driver support in OS9 IIRC. What i did accomplish to manage successfully is IOMMU groups, IRQ issues and binding the SCSI card to vfio-pci. I wasn't lucky with binding the SCSI scanner as an alternative. Mainly because of my own incompetence and lack of information on the QEMU documentation. Possibly i am on the right way with passing the SCSI host adapter. Please let me know if you need any terminal output, if you feel so inclined to help me out on this. I am on Linux Mint. If i will be successful, i will write a blog post on how to do that for my fellow scanner friends. Best, André Am 16. April 2025 16:08:16 MESZ schrieb BALATON Zoltan <bala...@eik.bme.hu>: >Hello, > >On Wed, 16 Apr 2025, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote: >> adding more PPC developers. > >Maybe they are more likely to be found on qemu-ppc list and adding Howard who >may have some guide on this. > >> On 16/4/25 10:42, André from Negmaster wrote: >>> First of all many thanks for your work on PPC emulation. >>> >>> I would like to request SCSI/PCI passthrough to MacOS9 if possible. >>> >>> I spent the last two days trying to get this working to no avail. To me it >>> seems QEMU can't do that. The PPC documentation is missing information >>> about passthrough. I would like to see some more information there. Because >>> i am still not sure if it would work or not. I passed all hurdles, like >>> IOMMU groups, IRQ issues etc...but still no SCSI card or scanner in the >>> system profiler. > >There's not enough information here to give more than generic advice (details >such as which qemu-system-ppc -machine, MacOS version, SCSI card, etc. may be >needed to see what you tried). In general it should work. Some people >successfully passed through video cards, usb and network cards for >qemu-system-ppc so QEMU can do that but this may not be plug and play >especially with MacOS if it needs an FCode ROM to be run as OpenBIOS does not >do that by default and may not be able to run it even if you try manually. We >needed patches for video card ROMs before. > >There are two ways to pass through a SCSI device: passing through the SCSI >card and letting the host handle SCSI and only pass through the SCSI device. >For the latter you need an emulated SCSI card that's recognised by the guest. >Most guides talk about virtio-scsi but I don't think MacOS has a driver for >that and don't know if any of the emulated SCSI adapters would work. Classic >Macs have an ESP SCSI adapter AFAIK and dc390 seems to be a PCI version of >that so maybe that could work but if MacOS needs anything in device-tree that >would be added by an FCode ROM then it's again the same problem as with a >passed through card. If you don't want to dig deeper and change anything in >OpenBIOS and QEMU to make it work what you could do is try all the emulated >SCSI devices and try to find MacOS drivers for them and see if any of those >works then if you get a SCSI adapter in the guest you could try passing >through the device only. For passing through the card I'd check first if it >has an FCode ROM and then try to run that in OpenBIOS manually (I forgot how >to do that but sombody may remember or dig up old messages on this) and then >maybe patch OpenBIOS to work with that. > >So it may not be easy to set up and may require fixing some issues here and >there but generally it's possible and was done for some cards before so >there's no theretical limit that would prevent it from working. > >Regards, >BALATON Zoltan
