Trouble w/Malta and qemu

[Ralf Baechle]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 03:01:46PM +0100, Bruce M. Simpson wrote:

> For what it's worth I can't get a kernel to boot on QEMU in malta mode. 
> This isn't too much of a loss as their documentation says their malta 
> emulation is incomplete. They have something closer to an x86 desktop in 
> their main mips4kc target.

The Malta emulation in Qemu is progressing fairly quickly and rather close
in the latest CVS version of Qemu.  It's still not perfect, YAMON has a
few timing critical parts in its initialization which are failing on Qemu
and there are a few other things that are still failing.

Linux/MIPS by default does a full PCI bus reconfiguration.  This matters
because Qemu is generally used without firmware, maybe that's breaking
your kernel?

> Documentation says the Linux/MIPS port for QEMU is 'special' in some 
> way. A custom built Debian kernel runs fine in QEMU on a FreeBSD host.

Linux has a special CONFIG_QEMU platform which exists as a temporary
kludge until Qemu actually emulates some real world hardware.  The
hardware supported by CONFIG_QEMU is vaguely like a PC with a RISC
processor.  I'm eventually planning to remove the whole CONFIG_QEMU
config once Qemu emulates some piece of real world hardware sufficiently
well.

  Ralf