Saturday, October 9, 2010

Bug in all Solaris versions after 5.7?!?

Tried to clean up some patches for submitting upstream, and it turned out that one of the hacks is needed because of a Solaris bug! I'm really astonished.
The init routine of the network card driver in Solaris 2.6 has this piece of code:

call      ddi_get_parent
ld        [%l0 + 0xc], %o0
call      ddi_get_driver_private
nop
add       %o0, 0x4, %g2
st        %g2, [%l0 + 0x720]

That's how it looks in Solaris 9:
call      ddi_get_parent
ld        [%l0 + 0x10], %o0
call      ddi_get_driver_private
nop
add       %o0, 0x10, %g2
st        %g2, [%l0 + 0x728]

Adding 0x10 to the base of dma registers, makes a pointer to a nowhere.

Yes, qemu is not precise, and doesn't emulate memory aliasing (Blue Swirl had a patch for it), but hey, Solaris works on sun4m only due to a coincidence!

So, all the Solaris versions from 5.7 to 9 can be booted in qemu by hot patching in kadb (booting kadb is already described in the how-to).

That's how I patched Solaris 9 for booting under qemu:
kadb[0]: le#leinit:bset a deferred breakpoint
kadb[0]: :c   continue execution
...
kadb[0]: leinit+0x654?i check that we are at the correct place
               add       %o0, 0x10, %g2
kadb[0]: leinit+0x654/X
leinit+0x654:   84022010
kadb[0]: leinit+0x654/W 84022004
leinit+0x654:   0x84022010    =   0x84022004       patch
kadb[0]: leinit:ddelete the breakpoint
kadb[0]: :c continue

Once again I can only recommend  reading the PANIC! UNIX System Crash Dump Analysis Handbook to understand the basics before patching anything.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Did java 5+ ever work on 32 bit SPARC machines?

Basically the question should sound "Did java 5_ ever work on 32 bit SPARC machines?", because for the plus part I already know the answer. Up to now it didn't.

Here goes the story: