[OpenBIOS] Solaris anyone?

[Blue Swirl]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Brian Vandenberg <phantall at gmail.com> wrote:
> (sorry for the duplicate mark)
>
>>
>> Excellent :)  In fact, latest OpenBIOS SVN has a fix for the scsi-options
>> part (it adds an extra property which gets picked up by the Solaris ESP
>> driver) and so you shouldn't have to do this any more. Any testing
>> gratefully received though!
>
> Yes - there is currently an issue with the Sun shell which causes OpenBIOS
> to select the wrong build settings. See Nathan's second thread
> here: http://lists.openbios.org/pipermail/openbios/2011-April/006389.html.
> If you could test the fix suggested at the end of the thread and report back
> to the mailing list, that would be greatly appreciated :)
>
> As soon as I can test this I'll report back.  Unfortunately, I won't be able
> to copy logs & the like as it's on an air-gapped network, but I'll do what I
> can to give pertinent details.
>>>
>>> That's interesting, since the guest should have no knowledge of the
>>> underlying storage mechanism being using in the host. Can you point to any
>>> more specific error messages (again, back on the list) to help people work
>>> out what is happening?
>
> Not a problem.
>>
>> In return, thank you for testing. It really is exciting to be close to the
>> point where QEMU can run SPARC Solaris out of the box - I have already used
>> it to great effect here and I know other people are excited to be able to
>> move applications of legacy hardware onto something a lot more modern.
>
> Out of curiosity, how likely is it that qemu-sparc32 could be used to run a
> solaris-based statically-linked user-mode application?

This would be implemented within QEMU only, so this does not concern
OpenBIOS much, but I gave a shot at it once:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/41437

It may be possible to make a Solaris user emulator which would allow
running Solaris/Sparc binaries on Solaris/x86 or vice versa, but there
are license compatibility issues and some technical issues to be
solved.