Qemu
QEMU support status regarding hppa/parisc
Starting with QEMU version 2.12 (April 2018), qemu fully supports 32-bit hppa user emulation (hppa-linux-user) and 32-bit hppa system emulation (qemu-system-hppa). All necessary changes have been merged into the upstream qemu git tree.
PA-RISC machines need a firmware ("PDC" = Processor Dependend Code). Qemu includes a precompiled PDC firmware for hppa (pc-bios/hppa-firmware.img), which is based on a fork of SeaBIOS .
The emulated machine is a HP B160L desktop machine, with one or more 32-bit PA7100LC CPUs.
The QEMU emulation is able to run Linux and HP-UX. HP-UX support still needs improvement which is being worked on.
QEMU on parisc has been made available by:
- Richard Henderson: QEMU CPU emulation (32-bit only), QEMU hardware divers
- Helge Deller: QEMU hardware drivers, SeaBIOS PDC firmware
- Sven Schnelle: Lots of fixes all over QEMU and SeaBIOS (SCSI, CPU emulation fixes, SeaBIOS PDC firmware)
Ready-to-run QEMU image for parisc
Download Debian hard disc image:
wget http://backup.parisc-linux.org/qemu/debian-10-hdd-img.tar.bz2
Unzip image:
tar xvfj debian-10-hdd-img.tar.bz2
Run qemu:
./hppa-softmmu/qemu-system-hppa -drive file=debian-10-hdd.img -nographic -serial mon:stdio -accel tcg,thread=multi -smp cpus=4
Log in as root, root password is "rootme"
How to build QEMU from source
Check out the qemu git tree
Run configure, e.g.
- (for system emulation) ./configure --target-list=hppa-softmmu --enable-numa
- (for user emulation) ./configure --target-list=hppa-linux-user --disable-stack-protector --prefix=/home/qemu-hppa/chroot-unstable --interp-prefix=/home/qemu-hppa/chroot-unstable --static
Run "make"
How to run QEMU with Debian-10 installer image
- Create a virtual hard disc once:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 hdd.img 50G
- download a Linux install image, e.g.
- Start emulator with the installer image once:
./hppa-softmmu/qemu-system-hppa -drive file=hdd.img -drive file=debian-10.0-hppa-NETINST-1.iso,media=cdrom -boot order=d -nographic -serial mon:stdio
- Choose typical installation options, the defaults are OK.
- Either skip the step "Configure the Package manager", or configure the mirror as with hostname "ftp.ports.debian.org", and directory "/debian-ports"
- Shut down virtual machine after installation
- Start emulator with installed operating system any time:
./hppa-softmmu/qemu-system-hppa -drive file=hdd.img -nographic -serial mon:stdio -accel tcg,thread=multi -smp cpus=2
- Edit the sources.list (/etc/apt/sources.list) file:
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main deb [arch=all] http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main
Some QEMU notes
Prefer the e1000 driver over the rtl8129 card. The latter gives irq issues with Dino emulation.
Possible qemu options:
- -accel tcg,thread=multi - always use this to enable parallel tcg (otherwise all guest CPUs run on one host CPU)
- -smp cpus=4 - define number of CPUs in the guest (maximum CPUs: 32)
- -boot menu=on - Firmware: enable interactive mode (boot prompt)
- -boot order=c - Firmware: Boot from hard disc
- -boot order=d - Firmware: Boot from CD/DVD
- -serial mon:stdio use serial console
- -nographic - no graphics device
- -device VGA - provide PCI VGA graphic card
Tips and Tricks when running an emulation
- Linux kernel >= 4.14 runs best. Initial Linux kernel optimizations were added to kernel >= 4.9.
- The "INTERRUPT KEY" mentioned sometimes by HP-UX can be emulated with the "Ctrl-\" key combination
- In case you lost the HP-UX root password, boot at ISL 'hpux -is' and then give a new password with running "passwd".
Possible emulation guest targets
- HP-UX, versions 9.x up to 11.11
- Linux (Debian, Gentoo), latest releases (>= 4.14) preferred
- NetBSD
- NextSTEP
- OSF/MkLinux
HP-UX
Still LASI NIC emulation and NCR 710 Emulation needed in order to be able to boot older HP-UX releases.
Astrobaby wrote about his test results.
NetBSD
Images at http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/latest/images/
Info at https://www.netbsd.org/releases/current.html
KERNEL=netbsd qemu-system-hppa \ -kernel ${KERNEL} \ -drive file=hdd.img \ -drive file=NetBSD-8.99.37-hppa.iso,media=cdrom \ -nographic \ -serial telnet::55555,server
(info by Nick Hudson <nick.hudson@gmx.co.uk>)
OSF/MkLinux
Download at ftp://ftp.cirr.com/pub/hppa/mklinux/ The file root_ext2_g.dd.bin.gz doesn't cleanly decompress.. so I did a gzip -dc into root_ext2_g.dd.bin.
MkLinux sources: https://github.com/slp/osfmk-mklinux
qemu-system-hppa -boot c -drive if=scsi,bus=0,index=3,file=root_ext2_g.dd.bin,format=raw \ -serial mon:stdio -nographic -m 128
It boots, but fails during device detection because Qemu currently emulates a B160, while MkLinux expects a HP700. So it fails to see the LASI chip below the GSC bridge.
NVM bootdata Bad Checksum (0) OSF Mach boot : /mach text (0x95618) at 0x11000 data (0x48594) at 0xa8000 Mach 3.0 VERSION(PMK1.1): cb <pmk1_1>; Wed Nov 26 17:20:37 MET 1997; mach_kernel/PRODUCTION (cameleon) HP9000/ unknown machine type 0x502 good luck :-) , 0K Icache, 0K Dcache, 256 entry shared TLB) Warning: unsupported module at ffc00000 (type:7 svers:0 hvers:50) Stack Trace (depth=1): 0x00084d68 End of Stack
(info by Jason Stevens <neozeed@gmail.com>)
Future QEMU work
Upstream merging currently beeing worked on (September 2019):
- Emulate Lasi
- Emulate Lasi NIC (Intel Apricot i82596)
- Artist graphics emulation
- STI text console emulation for Linux and HP-UX
- Add PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports
Still need to do:
- Add Dino/Lasi serial port
- Harmony sound card in Lasi
- Does HP-UX has some kind of "sleep" assembler instruction in it's idle loop which can be used to lower qemu power consumption?
- Fix virtio-drivers in SeaBIOS (endianess-bugs, because SeaBIOS is originally only Little-endian from x86)
- Emulate Tulip (DEC 21x40) network cards in Qemu
- More correct emulation of B160L in Qemu
- Emulate a 712 and/or j5000/c3000 machine
- Emulate built-in LASI SCI controller instead of PCI SCSI add-on card
- Elroy PCI emulation, then emulate e.g. a C3000?
- PA2.0/64bit (low prio)
- ...
- Push SeaBIOS changes upstream!!