[Qemu-devel] work needed to get solaris to boot under qemu-system-sparc

[Qemu-devel] work needed to get solaris to boot under qemu-system-sparc

[Ben Taylor]

The question came up a little while back about getting Solaris (Sparc) to boot in qemu
under qemu-system-sparc.

I did a little work yesterday to find out that the boot process in hw/sun4m.c is really
kind of hard wired for a linux boot.   If there is no kernel or initrd, it drops right through.
In reality, if those variables aren't set, and the boot device is cdrom, shouldn't there
be some code to load the boot block in slice 3 of the cd/dvd?  At worst case, it
seems that we could probably extract the boot block and force qemu to load that with
the hope of getting a solaris/sparc on qemu started, since slice 1 of the cd/dvd is
the kernel and root directory structure.  Slice 0 is the install media.

Ideas?  I'm neck deep in the pool and have no idea where to start.  

Ben

Re: [Qemu-devel] work needed to get solaris to boot under qemu-system-sparc

[Paul Brook]

On Thursday 25 May 2006 14:16, Ben Taylor wrote:
> The question came up a little while back about getting Solaris (Sparc) to
> boot in qemu under qemu-system-sparc.
>
> I did a little work yesterday to find out that the boot process in
> hw/sun4m.c is really kind of hard wired for a linux boot.   If there is no
> kernel or initrd, it drops right through. In reality, if those variables
> aren't set, and the boot device is cdrom, shouldn't there be some code to
> load the boot block in slice 3 of the cd/dvd?  At worst case, it seems that
> we could probably extract the boot block and force qemu to load that with
> the hope of getting a solaris/sparc on qemu started, since slice 1 of the
> cd/dvd is the kernel and root directory structure.  Slice 0 is the install
> media.
>
> Ideas?  I'm neck deep in the pool and have no idea where to start.

Real sun SPARC systems use an OpenFirmware (aka OpenBoot) based system.

http://www.openbios.org/ indicates there is a qemu/sparc port in progress.

Paul

Re: [Qemu-devel] work needed to get solaris to boot under qemu-system-sparc

[Ben Taylor]

---- Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com> wrote: 
> On Thursday 25 May 2006 14:16, Ben Taylor wrote:
> > The question came up a little while back about getting Solaris (Sparc) to
> > boot in qemu under qemu-system-sparc.
> >
> > I did a little work yesterday to find out that the boot process in
> > hw/sun4m.c is really kind of hard wired for a linux boot.   If there is no
> > kernel or initrd, it drops right through. In reality, if those variables
> > aren't set, and the boot device is cdrom, shouldn't there be some code to
> > load the boot block in slice 3 of the cd/dvd?  At worst case, it seems that
> > we could probably extract the boot block and force qemu to load that with
> > the hope of getting a solaris/sparc on qemu started, since slice 1 of the
> > cd/dvd is the kernel and root directory structure.  Slice 0 is the install
> > media.
> >
> > Ideas?  I'm neck deep in the pool and have no idea where to start.
> 
> Real sun SPARC systems use an OpenFirmware (aka OpenBoot) based system.

Right.

> http://www.openbios.org/ indicates there is a qemu/sparc port in progress.

well, interestingly enough, trying to boot a Solaris 10U1 sparc cd with 
qemu-system-sparc (32-bit) comes up and says this hw is not supported.
So the boot block appears to be getting read.  

I tried configuring with --target-list=sparc64-softmmu, but got an error when I
tried to run it, saying:

 /tmp/qemu5/share/qemu/proll-sparc64.elf: No such file or directory
qemu: could not load prom '/tmp/qemu5/share/qemu/proll-sparc64.bin'

attempting to copy the proll.elf to proll-sparc64.elf ended up in a core dump
with this message to start:

 fatal: Trap 0x0010 while trap level is MAXTL, Error state

I wouldn't have thought that the proll would have needed to be 64-bit.
is this just a feature of the sparc64 code not getting too much exercise?

I'll try somore more tests with earlier versions of Solaris and the sparc32
module.

Ben