Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows

After a while I got back to qemu. This time to the sparc64 port. It's interesting to see how the highlights of the sun4m story are repeating. With the difference that this time the way goes faster. The highlights of the last weekends:

• What? Not even a greeting message? I should give it up. hack, hack, hack
• Oh, wow, it gives a message "Button Power ON"! Too bad it hangs afterwards. hack, hack, hack
• Ha! got it up to the Forth bootstrapping, too bad I have no prompt. hack, hack, hack
• Yes! The Forth is with me, there finally is the "ok " prompt. Too bad it sees no devices. hack, hack, hack
• Woo-hoo, OBP sees a disk controller! Why doesn't it see the disks? hack, hack, hack
• Aha, there are my disks. Can I boot Solaris, please? Hrm, no. Can I boot anything? No?!? hack, hack
• Ok, now it's properly initialized. Well, properly enough to boot SILO, and yes, it's stuck at ufsboot just like the sparc32 version did.
• Ta-da! Finally I see something new:

SunOS Release 5.11 Version Natamar_0.4__b96 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.

• But wait, didn't I see it with OpenBIOS?!? Yes, I did. In fact all the 64 bit SPARC operating systems I tried so far go a little further with OpenBIOS.
• So, can OBP on qemu-system-sparc64 do anything the OpenBIOS can't?!? No?!? (because badly documented missing devices, probably necessary just for OBP, are badly hacked by me). I should give it up. :-)

And this is the progress so far. Hats off to the HelenOS team who managed to get their OS running under qemu. No other OS can work under qemu-system-sparc64 yet.

Does anyone have a Martux 0.2 image? It used to be available on the authors site, but seems to be gone, leaving just the check sum files. The file I'm looking for is

CD_sun4u_sparcv9__marTux_0.2__small_naked_demo_cd_bs2048b.iso.bz2 .

TME strikes back!

A great news for everyone who's interested in the 64-bit SPARC emulation (sun4u)!

After a nearly 3 years long pause Matt Fredette released the new version of TME - The Machine Emulator. Matt has skipped the sun4m emulation, which I think makes sense, because meanwhile qemu emulates sun4m pretty well (and fast!). Therefore the current list of the supported platforms is sun2, sun3, sun4c and sun4u. The only sun4u machine which tme can emulate is Ultra 1, so don't hold your breath for OpenSolaris support just yet.

But at least it can boot NetBSD 5. Also it uses the original OBP (not OpenBIOS) which implies that the emulation is pretty close to the hardware. It also seems to emulate cg6 graphic adapter which is much more powerful than qemu's tcx. Less powerful than Bob's cg14, but it's not yet included in the official git master anyway.

As for the OpenSolaris: it doesn't support the Ultra-1 and Ultra-2 machines. But! You can give a spin to Martux, the hacked OpenSolaris distribution which does have a support for the early Ultras.