Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu-system-sparc and Solaris 1.1.2 / SunOS 4.1.4

["Blue Swirl" <blauwirbel@gmail.com>]

On 2/14/08, Jan Holzhueter <jh@baltic-online.de> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>  we are planing to get rid of some old sparc hardware.
>  The problem is that there are applications on it that require
>  sun4m and Solaris 1.1.2 / SunOS 4.1.4.
>  As known qemu-system-sparc is not able to boot the Solaris Kernel at
>  the moment.
>
>  I get as far as:
>    [sparc] Booting file 'cdrom' with parameters ''
>  Not a bootable ELF image
>  Not a Linux kernel image
>  Not a bootable a.out image
>  Not a bootable ELF image
>  Not a Linux kernel image
>  Loading a.out image...
>  Loaded 7680 bytes
>  entry point is 0x4000
>  Jumping to entry point...
>  checksum 60746d10 != 86693bac, trying to boot anyway
>  Unhandled Exception 0x00000007
>  PC = 0x002002bc NPC = 0x002002c0
>  Stopping execution
>
>  My question is how far away are you form getting it to work
>  and in what time frame could it be done?

The problem is twofold: Qemu emulates the CPU and hardware devices,
OpenBIOS presents an Open Firmware interface to the kernel. The HW
part is somewhat complete, though every new kernel may expose new
bugs. For the OpenBIOS situation is a bit different as Solaris seems
to have some kind of undocumented assumptions of the interface.

For example in your report Solaris dies because of unaligned access
(trap #07). Could be a bug in OpenBIOS that Linux does not happen to
trigger.

>  This is a bigger project for us. So it might even be possible
>  ( nothing confirmed yet I have to check back with some people  )
>  to donate some money to get it to work.
>  It doesn't need to work for all Solaris. We just need Solaris 1.1.2.
>  If someone needs some installation Medium or feedback let me know.

Feedback is always appreciated. If you'd also like to debug this
problem, you could compile OpenBIOS with OF interface debugging
enabled.