sparc/sparc64 status

sparc/sparc64 status

[Jim]

I'm trying to virtualize some physical SPARC Solaris machines (mix of
Solaris 2.6, 8,9 & 10) and am using the latest Qemu 2.0.0 release
(previousl worked with the various rc versions).

With some work, I can *build* a SparcStation5 install of Solaris 2.6
from the install media - provided I use the SS5 ROM - but that seems to
be about the limit of what is achievable.

Solaris > 2.6 seems to fail with a variety of errors and crashes. 
Solaris 8 looked good with cg3 but the Java install crashes with an
internal hotspot error in the java virtual machine so never starts the
real install.

Using the Sparc64 to try and install Solaris 10 (or other versions) just
crashes either Qemu itself or in the Solaris boot.  I've tried changing
the CPU selection but that seems to cause the switch between Qemu or
Solaris crashing so it all looks pretty bad.

Lots of searching suggests some people have something working but I've
not found any magic formula or incantation of qemu which works for me.

Can someone point me where I should look ? (the qemu documentation does
not seem to cover Sparc since this is a much rarer case than the
mainstream x86 emulation most people do)

Happy to hear from Qemu-Sparc experts by e-mail too.  I have some
resources available for testing - hopefully if I get this running I can
document it for other people to follow too.

Thanks
Jim


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