Sunday, March 27, 2011

Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows

After a while I got back to qemu. This time to the sparc64 port. It's interesting to see how the highlights of the sun4m story are repeating. With the difference that this time the way goes faster. The highlights of the last weekends:
  • What? Not even a greeting message? I should give it up. hack, hack, hack
  • Oh, wow, it gives a message "Button Power ON"! Too bad it hangs afterwards. hack, hack, hack
  • Ha! got it up to the Forth bootstrapping, too bad I have no prompt. hack, hack, hack
  • Yes! The Forth is with me, there finally is the "ok " prompt. Too bad it sees no devices. hack, hack, hack
  • Woo-hoo, OBP sees a disk controller! Why doesn't it see the disks? hack, hack, hack
  • Aha, there are my disks. Can I boot Solaris, please? Hrm, no. Can I boot anything? No?!? hack, hack
  • Ok, now it's properly initialized. Well, properly enough to boot SILO, and yes, it's stuck at ufsboot just like the sparc32 version did.
  • Ta-da! Finally I see something new:
SunOS Release 5.11 Version Natamar_0.4__b96 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
  • But wait, didn't I see it with OpenBIOS?!? Yes, I did. In fact all the 64 bit SPARC operating systems I tried so far go a little further with OpenBIOS.
  • So, can OBP on qemu-system-sparc64 do anything the OpenBIOS can't?!? No?!? (because badly documented missing devices, probably necessary just for OBP, are badly hacked by me). I should give it up. :-)
And this is the progress so far. Hats off to the HelenOS team who managed to get their OS running under qemu. No other OS can work under qemu-system-sparc64 yet.

Does anyone have a Martux 0.2 image? It used to be available on the authors site, but seems to be gone, leaving just the check sum files. The file I'm looking for is
CD_sun4u_sparcv9__marTux_0.2__small_naked_demo_cd_bs2048b.iso.bz2 .