Using MOL to aid development a PPC OS?

[Samuel Rydh]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 10:50:04AM +0100, Andrew McCall wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I wasn't too sure if I should post to this list, or the general list - 
> but I decided on this one as the readers will be a bit more technical, 
> if I am wrong, please let me know and I will move the thread.
> 
> I know MOL isn't an emulator as such, but could MOL be used to aid 
> development of a home-brew PowerMac based OS? Much like BOCHS (as an 
> real hardware emulator) or VMware is used under ia32 hardware?

Certainly. MOL is quite suitable for this. It also has a
full featured assembly debugger (albeit a bit undocumented)
which is very helpful in tracking down bugs.

> I was specifically wondering how MOL would handle OpenFirmware commands 
> for the OS's boot process (as thats what I am working on right now!).

Well, MOL has an minimal open-firmware implementation (it is
run within MOL btw). It doesn't do fancy stuff like
interpreting forth code, but it supports the full callback
API.

You also have the option of loading the kernel image directly
without going through OF.

/Samuel