RE: Virtualizing HP PA-RISC unix station other than B160L

[thierry.briot]

Hi everyone,

 

Thank you for your answers.

First of all, I made a mistake : the HP-UX 10.20 kernel (vmunix) is in the /stand (not /boot) filesystem.

I tried replacing /stand of the physical machine iso image with the /stand filesytem of the emulated B160L because I supposed that drivers are linked with the vmunix kernel. Maybe it's false.

Furthermore, the /dev tree is important for dealing with the drivers.

 

I will continue to search for which files are hardware related. Maybe someone has done this research before ?

 

Best regards,

Thierry

 

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Envoyé : dimanche 5 septembre 2021 22:32
À : Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>; thierry.briot@gmail.com
Cc : qemu-devel@nongnu.org Developers <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>; linux-parisc <linux-parisc@vger.kernel.org>
Objet : Re: Virtualizing HP PA-RISC unix station other than B160L

 

Hi Thierry,

 

On 9/5/21 3:24 PM, Richard Henderson wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Sep 2021, 10:30 , <thierry.briot@gmail.com <mailto:thierry.briot@gmail.com>> wrote:

> For my company (Nexter Systems, France), I am using qemu-system-hppa

> for virtualizing HP PA-RISC workstations. That works well. You have

> made a very good job !

 

Thanks.

 

> But my machines are other than B160L (for example B180L), and I have

> to completely reinstall HP-UX on each emulated machine.

> If I do an iso system disk image of my B180L, this iso isn't bootable

> on qemu-system-hppa.

> 

> Thus, my questions are :

> 

> * Is it planned to emulate other HP unix workstations than B160L (for

> example B180L) ?

 

Maybe at some point a 64-bit capable system, e.g. C3000, and maybe an older 32-bit system, e.g. 715/64.

For the 64bit system additions to the emulated firmware and additional 64-bit qemu support is necessary, and for the 715/64 we need an additional NCR710 SCSI driver.

Both are lots of work.

 

The B180L is exactly the same as the B160L, with just a faster CPU:

https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-visualize_b132l_b160l_b180l.html

 

> * Or, what changes should I make to my iso image to do it usable ? If

> I replace the /boot /stand filesystem of the B180L image with the B160L one,

> I get a kernel panic at boot time.

 

I don't know HP-UX so well. I could imagine that your physical machines have different SCSI controller cards which are used by HP-UX, and which aren't emulated in qemu yet. That's maybe why qemu can't boot your already installed images.

If you post the output I maybe can give more info.

 

> Helge is the one that did all the hw support, I just did the CPU.

> There are no real plans to do another machine. I'm not familiar with

> the specs between the HP machines to know how much work that would be.

 

There is a very good overview of the various HP machines at openPA:

https://www.openpa.net/systems/

 

Helge