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 I'll document below.

Platforms

The following machines can be emulated. To see a full list type qemu-system-ppc --M help.

Model	Name	Notes
40p	IBM RS/6000 7020 (40p) (1990)	Can boot some versions of AIX
bamboo	bamboo board	First machine emulated by PowerPC
g3beige	Heathrow based PowerMAC (1997)
mac99	Mac99 based PowerMAC (1999)	Can run Mac OS 9.2 - 10.5 and some Linux distros
mpc8544ds	Mpc8544ds dev board
none	Empty machine
pegasos2	Genesi/bPlan Pegasos II	Can run AmigaOS 4.1 and some other Amiga-like OSes
ppce500	Generic paravirt e500 platform
ref405ep	ref405ep	Needs a file named ppc405_rom.bin which does not seem to be available anymore
sam460ex	aCube Sam460ex	Can run AmigaOS 4.1 FE and some others
virtex-ml507	Xilinx Virtex ML507 reference design

Machines

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

Current OS compatibility sheet

Operating system	Status	Notes
AIX 4.3	Working
AIX 5.1	Working	The PCnet driver does not work in this OS; seems to be a bug with the emulation
Windows NT 3.51 SP5	Not working	Incompatible with OpenBIOS
Windows NT 4.0 RTM	Not working	Incompatible with OpenBIOS