[Qemu-devel] OPENSTEP challenge...

[Patrick Schulz]

Hello Qemu developers!

Are you up for a challenge? Do you want to add another OS to your list of
supported ones? Here's your chance... :-)
For quite some time I've tried to use OPENSTEP 4.2 on qemu. In principle it
works, but here are the details:

plain VGA works (gives you 640x480 b/w screen)
EIDE works (hard drives work)
PCI works,
ISA works,
PS/2 mouse doesn't work (freezes after one move)
Keyboard works (as long as PS/2 mouse doesn't lock up)
serial mouse doesn't work (using the slsnif workround)
VESA graphics work, but incorrect (16bit modes produce too dark colors in
graphics mode, 8 bit modes don't produce anything useful)
cirrus-logic VGA - unknown
NE2000 - unknown
SoundBlaster - unknown

The most important thing is the mouse. You can't use OPENSTEP without it.
All tests were done on qemu 0.6.1 or several newer CVS snapshots. I also
used the Xlib-only patch and the rfb patch, the result is always the same:
as soon as you start moving the mouse, the cursor moves a bit and then locks
up (no more events) and the keyboard stops working. The Windows Qemu shows 
the same behaviour.
The OPENSTEP PS/2 mouse driver seems to be very picky, since VMware also has
problems with it (generates random events), Bochs however has no problems
with the PS/2 mouse, but is painfully slow.
An alternative would be to emulate a serial mouse or to use the serial port
of the host to attach a serial mouse (I can use VMware this way).
One more thing I discovered, if you generate many mouse events during
boot-up of  OPENSTEP (before the PS/2 driver has been loaded) the IDE
controller "looses" it's disks, you see timeouts and bus resets, but
OPENSTEP can't recover from it.

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to fix the mouse issues, but I'm
willing to help getting OPENSTEP to run on qemu. As soon as the mouse works
I can continue to test the other components. To get everything working, qemu
needs to have ISA and PCI bus working at the same time (SB16 and NE2000 need
to be ISA devices, VESA only works on PCI) or qemu adds new PCI "hardware"
such as an AMD Lance network adapter instead the NE2000.

What do you think?

PS  to moderator: I resent the message but without picture this time, sorry.

-- 
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