[OpenBIOS] Booting SunOS from OpenBIOS

[Artyom Tarasenko]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote:
> On 26/03/13 08:33, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:
>
>> There seems to be a problem with loading the SunOS 4.x under OpenBIOS:
>>
>> $  sparc-softmmu/qemu-system-sparc -L pc-bios -nographic -hda
>> disk-solaris-1.1.2
>>
>> Configuration device id QEMU version 1 machine id 32
>> CPUs: 1 x FMI,MB86904
>> UUID: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
>> Welcome to OpenBIOS v1.0 built on Aug 19 2012 13:36
>>    Type 'help' for detailed information
>> Trying disk...
>> Not a bootable ELF image
>> Loading a.out image...
>> Loaded 7680 bytes
>> entry point is 0x4000
>> bootpath: /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd at 0,0
>>
>> Jumping to entry point 00004000 for type 00000005...
>> switching to new context:
>> Unhandled Exception 0x00000007
>> PC = 0x00401a04 NPC = 0x00401a08
>> Stopping execution
>>
>>
>> Is the OpenBIOS guess correct and SunOS 4.x actually does have an a.out
>> loader?
>
>
> Yes, that looks good to me. From memory the Solaris 8 bootloader is an a.out
> bootloader based at 0x4000, and the kernel loads at 0x400000 so you're
> definitely getting into the kernel image.
>
> The quick and easy way to get a rough idea as to where the failure lies is
> to copy the kernel ELF image from your Solaris disk image and run objdump on
> it to find out the name of the function where the exception occurs based
> upon the exception address.
>
> If you're already in the kernel panic() function, then use a sparc-linux-gdb
> attached to QEMU with a breakpoint to get a stack backtrace at the exception
> point, which again should give you an idea of where the issue is based upon
> the function names.

I guess with "kernel" you mean the boot loader, since we obviously
don't get far enough for kernel loading.
It doesn't look like it has any symbols though:

$ sparc-linux-gnu-objdump -x -t -T -g  boot

boot:     file format a.out-sunos-big
boot
architecture: sparc, flags 0x00000002:
EXEC_P
start address 0x00400000

Sections:
Idx Name          Size      VMA               LMA               File off  Algn
  0 .text         00015158  00000000  00000000  00000020  2**3
                  CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, CODE
  1 .data         000042e0  00015158  00015158  00015178  2**3
                  CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
  2 .bss          00018950  00019438  00019438  00000000  2**3
                  ALLOC
sparc-linux-gnu-objdump: boot: not a dynamic object
SYMBOL TABLE:
no symbols


DYNAMIC SYMBOL TABLE:
no symbols

Artyom

-- 
Regards,
Artyom Tarasenko

linux/sparc and solaris/sparc under qemu blog:
http://tyom.blogspot.com/search/label/qemu