OpenBSD Journal

a Sparc64 Port updates

Contributed by Dengue on from the 64bit dept.

Theo recently updated the status on the Sparc64 port in a pair of emails to misc@ . For those of you salivating for an Ultra, here's the highpoints:

From an email titled: Sparc64 booting options

  • OK, I made some new sparc64 boot media, and we have confirmed that you can use floppy30.fs to boot at least an ultra1. It should also work on an ultra2 -- this media is designed for the sbus versions of the machines.
  • There is also a bsd.rd that will work fine on all machines, if you can get it onto the filesystem, or net boot it.
  • Finally, there is a floppyB30 that is designed for the pci machines. We are hearing that most of the pci machines cannot properly boot from floppies though, and in fact, have not yet heard of anyone having had success.
There are also some outstanding issues to help out with. From : Sparc64 status
  • there appears to be a bug in outgoing RPC XDR which generates incorrect packets, very likely because of the big endian 64 bit nature of ultrasparc. To debug this, start with rpc.rstatd and try to debug it there. This also causes amd to not work at all.
  • the console emulator pcons sometimes crashes. This automatically determines what console is going to be used, which well. it is a prom console.
  • no video support yet. hence no X.
Check out the links provided above for the full text of the messages.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Unless things have changed with in the past 18 months or so, Ultra 5's and 10's are incapable of booting via floppy. CD, disk and net are your only choices.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      This is a Solaris limitation, not an OpenBSD one.

      Comments

      1. By Gimlet () on

        IIRC, this is a limitation of certain OBP firmware revisions. All you need to do is flash...

  2. By Jack Cummings () jack-deadly-org@mudshark.org on mudshark.org


    Which gcc are they using? Last I heard the 64 bit port of 2.95.x and 3.0.x were buggy..

    --Jack

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on


      The same gcc is used for all archs. Yes, it has some bugs in it, but it's just made a full release. nevertheless.

      Binutils are different for 64bit arches. People sometimes confuse these two.

  3. By Anonymous () lemc@lemc.net on http://www.lemc.net/

    FreeBSD/sparc64 port boots into single user mode, and then *poof* OpenBSD is making progress too! hehe

    Comments

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