QEMU/PowerPC

QEMU can emulate the PowerPC architecture. It is able to emulate several machines which can each run a handful of operating systems, which will be documented below.

Platforms
The following machines can be emulated. To see a full list type.

IBM RS/6000 7020 (40p)
Workstation from ~1994. QEMU emulates the following peripherals for this machine:


 * PCI bridge
 * PCI VGA compatible card with VESA Bochs Extensions
 * 2 IDE interfaces with hard disk and CD-ROM support
 * Floppy disk
 * PCnet network adapters
 * Serial port
 * PREP Non Volatile RAM
 * PC compatible keyboard and mouse.

To start a very simple emulation that'll boot into OpenBIOS:

qemu-system-ppc -M 40p -boot c

AIX 4.3
To boot AIX you need a custom BIOS with serial as the console. Fortunately Artyom Tarasenko has done the hard work for us and made a BIOS that works with QEMU. Download it using wget or similar: wget https://github.com/artyom-tarasenko/openfirmware/releases/download/40p-20190413/q40pofw-serial.rom

Then create the hard disk image: qemu-img create -f qcow2 aix.qcow2 8G

You can download the AIX 4.3.3 CDs from WinWorldPC: https://winworldpc.com/product/aix/43x

Finally, boot QEMU with the following arguments:

qemu-system-ppc -M 40p -bios q40pofw-serial.rom -serial telnet::4441,server -hda aix.qcow2 -vga none -nographic -net none -cdrom /path/to/AIX_4.3/Volume_1.iso

If you have a physical CD, you can replace  with.

Telnet into port 4441 and begin the installation.

AIX 5.1
Mostly the same as 4.3. Again, you need to download a custom BIOS with serial as the console. The link for that is in the above section.

Create the hard disk image: qemu-img create -f qcow2 aix.qcow2 8G

You can download AIX 5.1 CDs from WinWorld (you only need the first 3 CDs): https://winworldpc.com/product/aix/51

Boot QEMU with these arguments:

qemu-system-ppc -M 40p -bios q40pofw-serial.rom -serial telnet::4441,server -hda aix.qcow2 -nic user -vga none -nographic -cdrom /path/to/AIX_5.1_CD_1.iso

If you have a physical CD, you can replace  with.

Telnet into port 4441 and begin the installation.

Bamboo
PPC440 embedded board, was initially used for KVM on the PPC440 (which has since been removed.) You can boot a Linux kernel on this board by downloading this image (you may have to right click and hit "Save Link"), extracting it, and booting QEMU with this:

qemu-system-ppc -kernel linux -initrd rootfs.cpio.gz -M bamboo -netdev user,id=u1 -device rtl8139,netdev=u1 -vga none -nographic

PowerMAC family boards (g3beige, mac99)
emulates a G3 PowerMac, whereas  emulates the G4 PowerPC Macs. It is recommended to use  in almost all cases unless it's for a compatibility reason. QEMU emulates the following peripherals for these machines:


 * UniNorth or Grackle PCI Bridge
 * PCI VGA compatible card with VESA Bochs Extensions
 * 2 PMAC IDE interfaces with hard disk and CD-ROM support
 * NE2000 PCI adapters
 * Non Volatile RAM
 * VIA-CUDA with ADB keyboard and mouse.

Like the 40p, both machines use OpenBIOS, which is capable of booting almost every version of PowerPC MacOS.

Some options that can be used with mac99 are: