[OpenBIOS] Booting SunOS from OpenBIOS

[Artyom Tarasenko]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 5:44 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> 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.

It doesn't look like FCode:

$  hexdump -C sunos4.bb |head
00000000  01 03 01 07 00 00 1a 58  00 00 03 10 00 00 c5 88  |.......X........|
00000010  00 00 06 cc 00 44 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.....D..........|
00000020  30 80 00 43 00 1b c0 10  00 1b d0 10 00 1b e0 10  |0..C............|
00000030  00 1b f0 10 00 1c 00 10  00 1c 10 10 00 1c 20 10  |.............. .|

There is no marker fd 03, mentioned by Tarl.

But still it's somehow strange a.out: I tried objdump from Linux/sparc
and from Solaris/Sparc. Both of them can't extract the symbols, in
spite of claiming that "HAS_DEBUG, HAS_SYMS".

Artyom

-- 
Regards,
Artyom Tarasenko

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