Previously, I blogged on how to Run skiboot (OPAL) on the POWER8 Simulator. If you want to build the full Open Power firmware environment, including the Petitboot bootloader and kernel, you can now do so!

My pull request for an op-build target for the simulator has been merged, so you can now do the following three steps to compile a kernel+initramfs to use with your built skiboot for development purposes:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:open-power/op-build.git
cd op-build
. op-build-env
op-build mambo_defconfig && op-build

Then you wait for a whole bunch of time while everything compiles! Afterwards, you should be left with a zImage.epapr in output/images/ that you can copy into your skiboot directory.

With zImage.epapr in your skiboot directory, when you run “make check”, the skiboot test suite will actually launch the simulator to verify that your skiboot code boots all the way to the petitboot prompt!

We now have two boot tests as part of “make check” for skiboot!