Solaris 9 under OpenBIOS

Together with Mark Cave-Ayland fixed a bug in OpenBIOS preventing Solaris 9 boot in a single user mode on sun4m. As it turned out, Sun relied on some undocumented behavior while walking though a device tree: calling the "child" function with a null argument is expected to produce the same result as calling it with a pointer to the root node.

So, in the next OpenBIOS release, it should be possible to boot Solaris 9 just like the versions 5.7 and 8 with just '-s' switch instead of '-b'.
Unfortunately my schedule rarely fits the QEMU-Release schedule, so this fix probably won't make it into the upcoming QEMU 2.2. release because of the code freeze. But for those, who are starting their day with 'git pull' the release schedule doesn't matter. ;-)

Stay tuned...

May the Forth be with you

Learning Forth. It is actually a very powerful language.

Don't know if the One Laptop Per Child initiative will give something to children, but it certainly brings something to me: very good Forth lessons.

There are also some useful documentation from Sun (meanwhile Oracle).