Re: Sparc Solaris 1.2 guest dumps core

[Peter Maydell]

On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 at 22:32, Michele Denber <mdenber@gmx.com> wrote:
>
> I'd like to run an ancient Solaris 1.1 (aka SunOS 4.1.4) guest in QEMU.  
> While following the directions here: 
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4, using QEMU 2.12.0 on a Sun 
> T4-1 host running Solaris 10, I get
>
> # /export/home/denber/qemu-2.12.0/build/sparc-softmmu/qemu-system-sparc  
> -bios /bkpool/qemuimages/ss5.bin -m 32 -nographic -hda  
> /bkpool/qemuimages/sunos414.img -hdb 
> /bkpool/qemuimages/Solaris1.1.2-SunOS4.1.4.iso
>
> WARNING: Image format was not specified for 
> '/bkpool/qemuimages/Solaris1.1.2-SunOS4.1.4.iso' and probing guessed raw.
>          Automatically detecting the format is dangerous for raw images, 
> write operations on block 0 will be restricted.
>          Specify the 'raw' format explicitly to remove the restrictions.
> Bus Error - core dumped
>
> I'm using the ss5.bin ROM from here: 
> https://github.com/itomato/NeXTSPARC/blob/master/ROMs/SPARC/ss5.bin
>
> Am I doing something wrong or is there some reason why this won't work?

QEMU 2.12.0 is pretty ancient at this point. The first thing I would
try is to use the most recent released version (5.0) and see if that
works any better.

Also, the SPARC backend (ie SPARC host support) is not maintained or
tested, so it is quite likely to have bugs in it, and Solaris host
OS support isn't very frequently used either. I would start by
trying to get something working on an x86-64 Linux host. Once you
have a working setup there then you can try the same thing on the
Solaris host if you really need to.

The warning about the image format guessing is harmless and you can ignore
it for the moment (it is possible to reformulate the command line to
tell QEMU the image is raw but you'd need to stop using the short-form
hda/hdb options to do so, which isn't worth doing until after you've
got something working at all).

thanks
-- PMM