Re: SPARC V9 boot process

On Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:29:24 +0000
David Brownlee <[email protected]> wrote:

> Somewhat random related question.
> 
> Could this same approach work on a 32 bit sparc (albeit slightly
> different code :)
> 
> Someone on sunhelp has a sparcstation 1 which seems to have an issue
> with bootblocks and I wondered if something like this could
> potentially try to track down exactly what is failing?
> https://www.sunhelp.org/pipermail/rescue_sunhelp.org/2025-October/143688.html
> 
> As I said, random question :-p
> 
> David

I looked at the message but not clear what the actual problem is.
Sounds like that person may be having hardware issues?

I don't have any SPARC V8 machines to test, but if somebody wants to
adapt this to 32-bits in order to rule out broken OS bootloader, then I
think it is possible, but the boot process may be quite different from
sun4u/sun4v. It may be the case that with older SPARC V8 OpenBoot, ELF32
bootblk binaries are not be supported, so they may need to compile into
older a.out format. This is a trial and error process as the detailed
documentation is somewhat lacking.