Re: Emulating Solaris 10 on SPARC64 sun4u

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 10/05/2020 03:46, address@hidden wrote:

> Good idea.
> 
> The ESCC device looks like it's written as a sysbus device. I think the
> Ultra 5 has no devices on the root sabre bus. The serial controller is
> behind the ebus (essentially isa). I'm guessing I would need to write a
> wrapper device around the memory io functions so that it can be used
> under the ebus - judging from the serial-isa implementation.
> 
> I think it might be possible to leave the ESCC as a sysbus device but
> I'm not familiar enough with OpenBIOS to expose the right information
> to Solaris and reason about what's happening confidentally. I don't
> expect writing a wrapper for isa to be difficult so I'll give that a
> go. Do you think it would be fine to just choose an arbitrary ioport
> address for the device?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jasper Lowell.

I'm not overly keen on this approach, because it's just swapping out one 
incorrect
device for another. The existing sun4u machine is fairly close to an ultra5 and 
I'd
prefer to move towards emulating the real machine rather than keep swapping out
random bits of hardware.

The main reason I added the sunhme emulation to QEMU was because I found that 
across
all my test images different OSs had different bugs in their NIC drivers/IRQ
handling, and this was the only solution that would work for all of them. My 
fear
with going the ESCC route is that you'll end up in exactly the same situation.


ATB,

Mark.