On Mon, 23 Jun 2014, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
On 23/06/14 20:26, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
(add Kevin to CC)
I'm afraid as you're the only person that can boot MorphOS this far
then we need you to diagnose and suggest a suitable alternative by
comparing the before and after output. Since MacOS is already a
supported client then if no solution can be found then it is likely
that this patch will be reverted :(
So should I revert the patch for now? We're already in soft freeze.
Well let's see if Zoltan can make any headway with debugging over the next
few days; if there's no progress by the weekend then sadly my recommendation
would be to revert in time for -rc0 as this definitely causes intermittent
boot failures in Darwin for me.
It would be nicer if it could be fixed instead of reverting. You could
help detangling the macio.c code for a start.
Just to clarify here: the macio/DBDMA code is quite complicated, but this is
because this device has to work around to the fact that currently the DMA I/O
routines currently need sector alignment whereas macio requires byte-level
alignment. There has been quite a lot of work at the lower levels to support
byte-level alignment (see Kevin's series at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-01/msg02163.html) but until
we can specify transfers to byte granularity in the dma_bdrv_*() APIs then
there isn't much we can do to clean up the macio.c code.
Kevin, are there any plans to bubble the byte-granularity block layer changes
up to the dma_bdrv_*() APIs in the near future?
Please bear in mind that QEMU supports a large number of OSs, and there is
already an enthusiastic group of people using Alex's OS X work (see
emaculation for many examples) so introducing an intermittent fault on a
supported OS is not an option here.
I should also re-emphasise that Alex/Andreas work on many different parts of
QEMU, and my work is currently unsponsored so while we are all keen to
improve QEMU to the point where it can emulate new OSs such as MorphOS, it's
not the case that we can simply drop what we are doing at the time to focus
on an issue that affects a single OS which is new and currently unsupported.
I also work unsponsored on this and not sure how long can I still find
time for it. I've already spent much more with this than I originally
planned as I'm doing it since end of this February already. So I'd like my
work so far to get upstream so that if I have to finish it's not lost and
others could use and build on it. If there's no chance that this can be
achieved by 2.1 then you could revert this patch and get back to it in 2.2
but that would delay things by months again. My patches are on the list
for quite some time so it's not like I'm asking you to work on this in the
last minute and this bug was reported on May 4th. I appreciate your help
so far very much and don't exepct this to be highest priority but I'd
like to make some progress too.
Now I think it's fair to say that I've spent quite a few hours helping you
and coming up with the original version of this patch, and I'm glad that you
Now doubt about that, thank you very much again.
are now seeing success with this. But what is important to us right now
heading towards a release is that patches don't cause any regressions.
All I can say is that debugging this stuff isn't easy, particularly with
MorphOS which has some rather unusual behaviours. But what we really need
from you now over the next few days is for you to compare the debug output
between the working and non-working cases and figure out if we can fix this
in time for the 2.1 release. You have everything you need (including my
acceptance test of booting both MorphOS and Darwin ISOs), so time to take a
deep breath and begin what should be a challenging yet ultimately rewarding
debugging process :)
I'm still working on finding a solution for the exception problems with
OpenBIOS that prevent MorphOS from working and I failed to understand the
whole working of macio, DBDMA and the whole block layer so far but I can
try to debug it. Can you tell how to reproduce the problem with Darwin?
The Darwin images don't seem to work with -M mac99 either before or after
the patch so no regressions there.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
