[OpenBIOS] Latest SPARC64 & Milax update

Blue Swirl blauwirbel at gmail.com
Sun Jan 3 10:10:57 CET 2010


On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> wrote:
> Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
>
>>> Tarl: is this nested boot process something that auto-boot should handle
>>> automatically based on various bootarchive properties set by the initial
>>> Fcode loader?
>
>> Sorry about the delay, I just checked my email.
>>
>> I don't believe there is anything that should be automatically handled by
>> the boot process - when you load /boot-archive, the fcode loaded should
>> itself at the end invoke whatever execution method is required. My
>> recollection is that boot-archive proceeds to load an ELF file and then
>> jumps to that - I can verify that on monday.
>
> Yeah; the part I couldn't see was how on earth the Fcode was loaded from
> /ramdisk-root. However some searching on the internet gave the following URL
> from one of the opensolaris mailing list archives:
> http://markmail.org/message/sfoiqklq7xcpcrld which gives the following quote
> about the booter phase:
>
>
> 6.2 Booter phase
>
> This phase is derived from the SPARC wanboot ramdisk process (see PSARC
> 2001/009), and is responsible for reading the boot archive from the root
> file system (or install server in wanboot's case) into a ramdisk device. It
> does this by:
>
> 1) opening the boot-device (which it found as the "bootpath" property in the
> OBP "/chosen" node)
>
> 2) using its file system specific reader to read the boot archive (by
> default, /platform/`uname -m`/boot_archive)
>
> 3) creating a ramdisk device in "/ramdisk"
>
> 4) creating "bootarchive" and "fstype" properties in | "/chosen" |
>
> 5) booting the archive (a ramdisk is just another type of disk, so executing
> the boot block area serves this purpose)
>
>
> Given that init-program in OpenBIOS checks for several different payloads,
> I've simply added an Fcode payload detection routine that detects the
> version1 or startX words, skips the Fcode header and then runs the Fcode
> evaluator. This seems to work fine on my tests here, so I'll commit in a
> short while.
>
>> Have we verified that OpenBios can jump to a SPARC ELF file?
>
> Hmmm no - looking at the PPC code for the go word it seems that we need
> someone who owns a copy of the IEEE-1275 bindings for SPARC and who is
> proficient in SPARC assembler to implement this :(

Which bindings? http://playground.sun.com/1275/home.html gives a SPARC
binding but that is for V8.



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