Sparc64 OpenBIOS

[Nick Couchman]

I'm attempting to use OpenBIOS on Sparc64 with Qemu, and am getting some errors trying to boot.  Here's the output that I get:

Welcome to OpenBIOS v1.0 built on Oct 20 2009 21:00
  Type 'help' for detailed information

[sparc64] Booting file 'disk' with parameters ''
Not a bootable ELF image
Not a Linux kernel image
Not a bootable a.out image
Not a bootable FCode image
Not a bootable ELF image
Not a Linux kernel image
Not a bootable a.out image
Not a bootable FCode image
Unsupported image format

0 > boot cdrom 
[sparc64] Booting file 'cdrom' with parameters ''
Not a bootable ELF image
Not a Linux kernel image
Not a bootable a.out image
Loading FCode image...
Loaded 7420 bytes
entry point is 0x4000
Evaluating FCode...

seek failed

Can't mount root

byte-load: exception caught!
 ok
0 >

This is a Solaris 10 SPARC disc - it looks like it finds the boot code it needs fine, but can't load it for some reason.  Any hints or any thing else I can do to help debug the situation would be great.

Thanks - Nick

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[Tarl Neustaedter]

Nick Couchman wrote:
> [...]
>
> 0 > boot cdrom 
> [sparc64] Booting file 'cdrom' with parameters ''
> Not a bootable ELF image
> Not a Linux kernel image
> Not a bootable a.out image
> Loading FCode image...
> Loaded 7420 bytes
> entry point is 0x4000
> Evaluating FCode...
>
> seek failed
>
> Can't mount root
>
> byte-load: exception caught!
>  ok
> 0 >
>
> This is a Solaris 10 SPARC disc - it looks like it finds the boot code it needs fine, but can't load it for some reason.  Any hints or any thing else I can do to help debug the situation would be great.

What the Solaris 10 boot-blocks do (which is different in 
OpenSolaris/Nevada, and somewhat varies between updates of Solaris 10) is:

- create /packages/ufs-file-system (or hsfs-file-system)
- call do-boot, which it has just defined.

At the point above,  where it has failed and you are at the ok prompt, 
you should be able to see do-boot, which includes something like:

: do-boot
  4000 loadbase!
  loadbase " hsfsboot" get-file if
    ." Boot load failed" cr xit
  then
  reloc&go
;

It's pretty clear you are dying in get-file, which is also external at 
this point, and you can debug it.

The "seek failed" message comes from an attempt to read a block that 
isn't within the partition boundaries. Either there is something wrong 
with the HBA driver for the cdrom, or something is going wrong chasing 
down hsfs data pointers.