[OpenBIOS] input length

[Artyom Tarasenko]

Hi Mark,

>> Meanwhile qemu-system-sparc is good enough to boot most Solaris
>> versions with OBP.
>> ( http://tyom.blogspot.com/2009/12/solaris-under-qemu-how-to.html )
>
> Great to have you working on OpenBIOS - the story on your blog of getting
> Solaris to boot with OBP has been really fascinating.

Thanks. But I think my success was partly a pure luck, and partly a lack
of interest in launching Solaris from more experienced people and then again
a luck of getting these experienced people on board. Anyone
who had debugged Solaris kernel on a real  hardware would have probably
achieved in hours the things for which I needed months. Basically Mitch
Bradley proved this by going all the chain from what looked like
a scsi-disk bug to finding a cpu math bug within just one day.

But overall the idea of using OBP to find bugs in qemu was good. After
we fixed qemu-sparc,
you guys have more solid base to improve OpenBIOS. Having two suspects
for bugs is
always worse than one.

>> I'm trying to find out what is missing in OpenBIOS to do the same.
>> Currently the boot just hangs.
>> I did a wild guess:
>> $ strings sun4m/ufsboot
>> ...
>>  ['] find-device catch if 2drop true else current-device device-end then
>> swap l!
>> ...
>>
>> It looks like all the keywords are known to the OpenBIOS, but I can't
>> input the test string:
>> " /options" ['] find-device catch if 2drop true else current-device
>> device-end then swap l!
>>
>> it is longer than 80 characters, and OpenBIOS lets me enter only the
>> part of the string up to "device-end t".
>
> You should be able to split the above test string at any whitespace
> character, since the Forth engine handles the switch between word
> interpreting/compiling automatically. All whitespace, including CRs/LFs is
> generally ignored.
>
>> The questions are:
>>  - is it just an interactive command line limitation, or an api
>> limitation?
>
> I suspect just an interactive command limitation.

Doesn't look like this: I patched ufsboot by replacing space character with
 0x0a and now it gets a bit further!

-- 
Regards,
Artyom Tarasenko

solaris/sparc under qemu blog: http://tyom.blogspot.com/