Re: Booting 10.0 from CD on Sparc IPC fails - Data Access Exception

Mouse <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sparc
Message-ID <[email protected]>
> The limit varies depending on the machine.  From the sparc/boot man page:

>   On sun4 and early PROM version sun4c machines, the PROM can only
>   boot from the first 1Gb of the disk.

>   On later PROM version sun4c and early PROM version sun4m machines,
>   the PROM can only boot from the first 2Gb of the disk.

>   On later PROM version sun4m machines, the PROM can only boot from
>   the first 4Gb of the disk.

In case anyone is curious, these probably are:

- The 1G limit probably comes from using only 6-byte CDBs for SCSI
   access, meaning only 21 bits of (½k) sector number.

- The 2G limit probably comes from using a signed 32-bit byte offset.

- The 4G limit probably comes from using an unsigned 32-bit byte
   offset.

I have some machines set up with a small (anywhere from 32M to ½G)
partition at the beginning of the disk, containing nothing but booters
and kernels, with a kernel configured to put root on another partition,
to work around problems such as this.

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