[OpenBIOS] Booting SunOS from OpenBIOS

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 04:07:15PM -0400,  wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 08:28:58PM +0100, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:
> > That would explain it, but are you sure that was already so in the
> > SunOS 4.x times?
> > 
> > $ dd if=sunos.img of=sunos4.bb bs=512 skip=1 count=15
> > 15+0 records in
> > 15+0 records out
> > 7680 bytes (7.7 kB) copied, 6.3956e-05 s, 120 MB/s
> > $  file sunos4.bb
> > sunos4.bb: sparc executable not stripped
> > $  sparc64-linux-gnu-objdump -x sunos4.bb
> > 
> > sunos4.bb:     file format a.out-sunos-big
> > sunos4.bb
> > architecture: sparc, flags 0x0000003e:
> > EXEC_P, HAS_LINENO, HAS_DEBUG, HAS_SYMS, HAS_LOCALS
> > start address 0x00440000
> > 
> > Sections:
> > Idx Name          Size      VMA               LMA               File off  Algn
> >   0 .text         00001a58  00000000  00000000  00000020  2**3
> >                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, CODE
> >   1 .data         00000310  00001a58  00001a58  00001a78  2**3
> >                   CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, DATA
> >   2 .bss          0000c588  00001d68  00001d68  00000000  2**3
> >                   ALLOC
> > sparc64-linux-gnu-objdump: sunos4.bb: File truncated
> 
> The boot file for sunos4 at http://chris.shenton.org/sysadm/xterminals/
> is a 110336 byte a.out binary by the looks of it.
> 
> I am not sure if all sun machines used openboot with forth.  Anyone know?

Well I found a page that said the sun4/110 does not use forth (and
apparently this made the firmware interface vastly faster to work with
than the ones written in forth).  So at least some early sparc boxes
had a sun3 style firmware.  Probably meant the boot code would be different
too on those.

My guess would be that the sun4/1xx and sun4/2xx were not openboot,
while the sparcstation and sparcserver models probable all are.
So probably sun4c and sun4m were the first with openboot then.  Sure is
hard to find good details on these old things.

-- 
Len Sorensen