Open Firmware for qemu-system-ppc -M prep

I'm glad to announce the result of some weekends of work: a new firmware which is not just open, but is also powerful (it runs on Power CPUs), free (the individual files are licensed under MIT and BSD licenses) and of course legendary - it's based on the original PReP firmware from Mitch Bradley's FirmWorks company.

That's how it happened: Mitch licensed the files from the original PReP firmware under the MIT license, I adjusted them to the current OFW tree and added some build files. Then I gathered a small firmware for QEMU PReP machine which used a Cirrus Logic graphics adapter (need a one line change in QEMU code to enable it). Then I added a driver for QEMU "standard" VGA Adapter (also known as Bochs Graphic Adapter) and this night Mitch has committed it together with my atapi fixes as svn.3738 here:

http://code.coreboot.org/p/openfirmware/source/tree/HEAD/

What's in the tree? The original 1994-2000 stuff landed in the /cpu/ppc/prep directory. The build files for generic PReP firmware on top of the generic PPC firmware are in the /cpu/ppc/prep/build folder. And QEMU-specific stuff is in /cpu/ppc/prep/qemu folder. For those who don't want to compile it, but would like to try it straight away I've built two binaries: qprepofw-vga-svn-3738.rom which uses QEMU in graphics mode, and qprepofw-serial-svn-3738.rom for serial console (in the current QEMU version I found no way for guest to see if qemu-system-ppc -M prep is launched with an additional -nographic option).

How to use it:

qemu-system-ppc -M prep  -bios qprepofw-vga-svn-3738.rom  -cpu 603 -hda /path/hdd-image -fda /path/floppy -cdrom path/cd

or

qemu-system-ppc -M prep -bios qprepofw-serial-svn-3738.rom  -cpu 603 -hda /path/hdd-image -fda /path/floppy -cdrom path/cd -nographic

And then

boot disk

or

boot cdrom

or

boot floppy

The advantages over OpenHackWare (default QEMU firmware for PReP target) and OpenBIOS:

• can boot from floppies and cdrom images. It's possible to boot for instance NetBSD-6.1.3-prep.iso. Of Course, It Runs NetBSD!™
• supports QEMU's -vga std, -vga cirrus graphic adapters and serial console
• is written in Forth (OpenHackWare is not), has command history, Forth syntax highlighting and code completion.
• uses the original layout for NVRAM

The drawbacks:

• doesn't detect the amount of RAM present and the screen resolution. For now I've just hard-coded 128MiB and 1024x768. Is a trivial thing to support once QEMU chooses the way this information is passed to the firmware (OHW and OpenBIOS use different mechanisms, there are patches which are removing the former one and adding the later, but they are not in upstream yet)
• can't boot from Apple Partition Boot Code. The original RS/6000 firmware was probably not able to do it either, but OpenBIOS can do it and maybe it's a nice feature for testing (not sure if it is important yet: on one hand there are more PPC distributions for Macs, on the other hand, Macs had slightly different hardware and firmware than PReP machines)

So, digital archaeologists,  have fun and please report if you could do with OHW something which OFW can't.

Stay tuned...