Re: NVMM missing opcode REPE CMPS implementation

[Reinoud Zandijk <reinoud%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 10:58:25AM -0600, Robert Nestor wrote:
> > I have never tried to boot MacOS-X with qemu+nvmm. I think lots of other
> > things will need to be prepared for qemu to even start.
> > 
> > Do you know of other possible (more recent) OSs I could try to boot?
> 
> I’m no expert on any of the VM implementations, but from my experience
> running various versions of MacOS-X under VirtualBox and KVM on Linux works
> well enough to install and run basic applications without requiring anything
> more than the SMC key which qemu supports.  Things like game playing, audio
...
> Not being experienced in this, my approach has been to try and get something
> running in MintLinux using KVM, and if it runs there I try to run it under
> NetBSD with NVMM.i

Sounds like a sound plan. I am not familar with KVM but apparently it seems to
work quite well :)

> I’ve tried XEN under MintLinx for some of the same experiments, but haven’t
> had a lot of success.  I think on my system it’s some sort of configuration
> issue.  I haven’t tried XEN under NetBSD mainly because I haven’t taken the
> time to try to figure out the manual configurations I need.  Tried bypassing
> that by using VirtManager, but it doesn’t work (for me) on NetBSD - some
> issue about missing python scripts or modules.

IIRC, XEN uses Qemu too (regretfully) :-/

> MacOS-Simple-KVM does work for installation and running of MacOS-X versions
> 10.13 thru 10.16 under KVM.  (MacOS-X 10.6 Big-Sur is current I believe.)
> The scripts used don’t require having the MacOS media as it fetches what it
> needs from the Apple Servers.  I have an older script that works with 10.6
> and 10.9 (the two versions I tested), but it requires that one has the
> official Apple distribution media to install from.  None of these require
> any special setup or hacks other than inserting the SMC key into the qemu
> invocation command which I believe is embedded in the MacOS-Simple_KVM
> scripts.

It would be nice to see if macOS X boots on NetBSD running on an AMD CPU using
NVMM since it has a different backend than the Intel ones and of that I know
it doesn't boot it for completely obscure reasons.

Reinoud