Playing with Open Firmware

Made a couple of small improvements in Open Firmware and sent the patches to Mitch Bradley. One fix is probably not relevant for the most of users: it has to do with handling fdisk/MBR partitions on CDs. Another one may be more interesting for those who use CD/DVD drives on OLPC.
I was hoping to do something useful, but it turned out OLPC don't have a built-in cdrom drive. Still there can be one or two users who have external drives and would like to boot from them.

I didn't realize till recent times that as a part of his work on the OLPC Project, Mitch released the original Open Firmware base for ARM, MIPS, PPC and x86 machines. It has some advantages over OpenBIOS: Forth syntax highlighting,  word completion, more comfortable debugging and an emulator of Power CPUs to simplify cross-platform building.

It is distributed  under MIT Open-Source License, which may be more suitable than GPL for some projects.

May the Forth be with you. :-)

Upstream QEMU can run NetBSD/sparc64

Mark did a good job fixing OpenBIOS properties and cmd646 emulation in QEMU, so NetBSD started to get up to the user space. Then I sent my patch for emulation of short load instructions upstream, so with all this patches applied qemu-system-sparc64 can successfully boot NetBSD 6.1.4 (and likely all the other sparc64 versions):

       
Updating motd.
Starting sshd.
postfix: rebuilding /etc/mail/aliases (missing /etc/mail/aliases.db)
Starting inetd.
Starting cron.
Sat Aug  9 11 11:18:59 CEST 2014

NetBSD/sparc64 (netbsd614) (console)

login: root
Aug  9 11:19:27 netbsd614 login: ROOT LOGIN (root) on tty console
Last login: Fri Jan  1 13:21:40 2010 on console
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
    2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 6.1.4 (GENERIC)

Welcome to NetBSD!

Terminal type is wsvt25.
We recommend that you create a non-root account and use su(1) for root access.
netbsd614#  ping 10.0.2.2
PING 10.0.2.2 (10.0.2.2): 48 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.2.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.463 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=1.994 ms

Have fun and please report the bugs to the qemu-devel@ mailing list.