[OpenBIOS] Latest SPARC64 & Milax update

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:

> Stepping through with the debugger shows that it is now dying in the 
> very last line of exec-file which reads:
> 
> " to load-base init-program"  evaluate
> 
> So it looks as if we're very nearly there. My guess would be that 
> OpenBIOS is dying somewhere within init-program. Does anyone know 
> anything about what init-program should be doing under SPARC64? Has it 
> ever been tested before?

Hmmmm now I see what the problem is - load-base is actually a special 
configuration word and not a variable. Hence when the Fcode executes "to 
load-base" it overwrites the first part of the load-base word causing 
the crash.

Reading the OF specification in section 7.4.4.1 it seems that OpenBIOS 
violates the Fundamental Data Type property of configuration variables 
since they are stored in a special configuration word format. I think 
the only way to solve this is rework the NVRAM code so that it respects 
the fundamental data types when creating the configuration variables. 
Does everyone agree that this is the way forward?


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
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