On 24/03/2022 15:39, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hi Mark! On 3/24/22 15:40, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:Are there any plans to improve the NVRAM emulation in QEMU or is there any alternative command that we should run on QEMU-based systems?OK, the solution is actually as simple as skipping the "nvram" command when running inside a QEMU guest. However, I have no clue how to detect whether it's running on a QEMU-emulated PowerMac or a real one. Any ideas? Adrian
Hi Adrian,This is a little bit of a tricky one: QEMU uses a custom format to store its NVRAM info (which I think is derived from PReP?), so even just adding a backing store would still cause issues with some utilities such as nvram which are evidently looking for a specific Apple NVRAM layout which I don't believe is documented.
IIRC from my previous testing the older images used to pop up a dialog box in the Debian Installer when the nvram command failed giving the option to either Retry or Ignore, at which point I'd just hit Ignore and carry on anyway. Is it possible to keep the same behaviour with your latest changes? I think this would certainly be the simplest solution in the short term as it won't affect real machines, and I can document the error as a QEMU known issue.
ATB, Mark.