Re: [Qemu-devel] Solaris SPARC guest on QEMU

[Blue Swirl]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Artyom Tarasenko
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 2009/9/14 Luis Freitas <address@hidden>:
>> Hi,
>>
>>   I would like to use QEMU to run a guest Solaris 8/Sparc machine.
>
> You are not alone. This topic pops every 1-2 years.
>
>>   Seems that openbios is missing something that Solaris needs to complete 
>> the boot process. I posted a entry on the qemu users forum but got no 
>> replies. The boot seems to be failing after the initial boot program is 
>> loaded from the disk, it seems unable to find the second stage boot program, 
>> so it is probably something related to how the second stage should identify 
>> the boot device.

Maybe the raw disk access (without partition translation) does not
work. There was something on OpenBIOS list recently for PPC:
http://www.openfirmware.info/pipermail/openbios/2009-September/003977.html

> The real Sun's OBP under qemu has the same problem. I guess it's not
> the problem of OpenBIOS, but some bugs in SCSI/DMA/(IO)MMU layer.
> It's not the identification of the boot device though. The first stage
> reads something from a disk. It just fails to find some magic patterns
> in what it gets.

IIRC the CD-ROM drives used by Sun were slightly different from
standard SCSI models, something like the block size could be 512 bytes
instead of 2048 or vice versa.