Stefan wrote:
If someone has boot CDs or ISO images of SunOS 4 / Solaris 2.4 or older, any help in testing is very welcome.
I have a Solaris 1.1.2 (SunOS 4.1.4) boxed kit sitting in my office, plus some Sparcstation IPX and ELC hardware running Sunos 4.1.3 / 4.1.4. Possibly I have Solaris 1.1.1 (SunOS 4.1.3) media somewhere too (it would be in a pile of inherited stuff I got when I got the Sparcstations - sigh !)
So, if you want some files, extracted from these systems or CDs let me know EXACTLY what you want - go easy on me, I'm still a newbie !
As soon as I can figure out how to make QEMU work best for me (presently under Windows) I will let you know. I've managed to get it to build under MINGW, after working around the dependence on fsync() function calls in some of the disk image handling modules (which does not exist on Win32). Which reminds me, I need to feed this back to the QEMU developers !
Alternatively, I can try building QEMU under Solaris 10, 8, 7, 6 or 5, all of which are running on one or more of the workstations in the office - I probably need to sort out the right GCC and GNU tools to use for these though, so any help appreciated.
My long term goal is to be able to switch off the Sparcstations entirely so that we can retire the ageing hardware, and fire up a "virtual Sparc" whenever I need to do some legacy work. I've had similar success with DEC hardware guru Bob Supnik's SIMH, a VAX emulator, which runs the entire VMS operating system on it (see http://simh.trailing-edge.com) or can also emulate a number of other interesting nostalgic CPUs and systems. I reckon if they can make VMS run reliably in an emulator, that's VERY impressive. Hopefully one day QEMU / OpenBIOS can be so good.
The only downside with QEMU and SIMH seems to be that they eat 100% of my CPU because the target CPUs do not use any sort of HLT mechanism to pause the CPU when idle - at least on a hyper threading CPU it is only running at 50% according to task manager !
Regards
Jason