SunOS 4.1.4 again

Got back to SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2). Thanks to Carey Sсhug, I had a chance to test in on a hard drive image. While serial port driver still has problems, the system is alive in the background and using qemu port forwarding  I was able to login via telnet:

SunOS UNIX (sol112)

login: root
SunOS Release 4.1.4 (GENERIC) #2: Fri Oct 14 11:09:47 PDT 1994
sol112#

FPU bugs

Found more bugs. This time in FPU. One was very promptly fixed by Blue Swirl (the mysterious qemu-sparc maintainer). Another one is more tricky. qemu goes astray and doesn't stop at breakpoint, so it's gonna be hard to find out what exactly is going on.

sent another qemu patch upstream

The -m 256 option should be not necessary anymore. The minimal RAM amount for the emulated SPARCStation-5 is now 32 MiB. So OBP should understand now the memory sizes of 32, 64, 96, 128, 160,192, 224 and 256 MiB. When not specified, the default value of 128 MiB is taken.

The support of RAM size <256MiB is important for SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) because its installer crashes under qemu when started with "-m 256" option.

Will update the how-to shortly.

a couple of bugs in OpenBIOS

Found two bugs in OpenBIOS. I think I fixed one of them, but it can be checked only when the other one gets fixed. The other one is pretty deep in the Forth engine, don't want to mess with it. Once it will be fixed I'll get back to OpenBIOS.

The ultimate way of starting qemu under Windows

Being on vacation I gave a shot on building and launching qemu under Windows. Of course I was stumbled on getting the message

chardev: backend "stdio" not found
qemu: could not open serial device 'mon:stdio': No such file or directory

when running with  -nographic option. The option is necessary for launching qemu with SPARCstation-5's OBP, as it doesn't support qemu's TCX graphic card.

I googled, but found only that many people have stumbled over this problem before with no luck of solving it. And then I was so desperate that I read the qemu manual page. And you know what? The solution is described there! Instead of using console for standard I/O, it's possible to redirect it to a port, and telnet there:

sparc-softmmu/qemu-system-sparc -nographic  -serial mon:telnet::4444,server,nowait -bios ../sparc/ss5.bin -hdd ../sparc/solaris-disk

And then just telnet to localhost:4444.
Now I have Solaris/sparc running on my Windows laptop. ;-)

Moreover I think the option -serial mon:telnet::4444,server,nowait is pretty useful for Unix hosts too. When stated with it you have ability to get into qemu console by pressing Ctrl-A c,  and hence eject/insert virtual CD-ROMs, plugging unplugging disks and so on.

Update:  the above method works if qemu is  compiled under cygwin. With plain msys/MinGW, it has to be started with
-monitor file:bob.txt -bios ..\ss5.bin -m 256 -M SS-5 -serial mon:telnet:127.0.0.1:4444,server,nowait
options. Thanks, Neozeed.