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Revision a9f8ad8f

IDa9f8ad8f2acdb2398da5d32a5efc19cb0196d79f

Added by David Gibson almost 14 years ago

Add SLOF-based partition firmware for pSeries machine, allowing more boot options

Currently, the emulated pSeries machine requires the use of the
-kernel parameter in order to explicitly load a guest kernel. This
means booting from the virtual disk, cdrom or network is not possible.

This patch addresses this limitation by inserting a within-partition
firmware image (derived from the "SLOF" free Open Firmware project).
If -kernel is not specified, qemu will now load the SLOF image, which
has access to the qemu boot device list through the device tree, and
can boot from any of the usual virtual devices.

In order to support the new firmware, an extension to the emulated
machine/hypervisor is necessary. Unlike Linux, which expects
multi-CPU entry to be handled kexec() style, the SLOF firmware expects
only one CPU to be active at entry, and to use a hypervisor RTAS
method to enable the other CPUs one by one.

This patch also implements this 'start-cpu' method, so that SLOF can
start the secondary CPUs and marshal them into the kexec() holding
pattern ready for entry into the guest OS. Linux should, and in the
future might directly use the start-cpu method to enable initially
disabled CPUs, but for now it does require kexec() entry.

Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <>
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <>
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <>

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