Sunday, January 24, 2010

Solaris 7 (aka SunOS 5.7)

Actually I didn't tell the truth as I wrote that I didn't have anything up my sleeve. People who read this blog noticed, that I claimed I could boot Solaris 7, but the how-to explicitly says it is not possible with the vanilla qemu.

Yes, I have a hack which would allow booting Solaris 7, but re-writing it properly would take some time.

The question is what do you think is more important: enabling Solaris 7 (~ 2 weekends), or fixing existing issues with Solaris 2.{4-6} (no time estimates, research necessary)?

Does Solaris 7 have something useful what 2.x didn't have?

5 comments:

Brent said...

Both would be cool, but I'd vote on focusing on existing issues in 2.6.

Of course, that's assuming the Solaris 7 fix would have no other benefit?

atar said...

small another benefit would be ability to work with any supported ram amount, so that -m 256 won't be necessary.

JIra said...

Well, there doesn't seem to be much activity here lately, but I have recently become interested in running Solaris/SPARC on an X86 Linux box. By coincidence, qemu is approaching the 1.0 release. I have tried a variety of Solaris versions, and have found that Solaris 7 Generic 10/98 (Server) works the best. At this point I am finding that about 50% of the time the installed image hangs while starting syslog. About 33% of the time, I can actually login and test some programs. The rest of the time it hangs on volmgt starting or other places.

Here is what I am doing:
qemu-1.0-rc4 # sparc-softmmu/qemu-system-sparc -m 256 -prom-env auto-boot?=false -hda ../36GB.disk -bios pc-bios/openbios-sparc32 -nographic

Eris Blastar said...

My brother Orion fixed Solaris 7 here it had the NICFIT bug introduced by Apple. He changed one byte in the kernel using a hex editor otherwise it is a Solaris 7 for SPARC image.

atar said...

I guess the bug was introduced by Sun, not Apple. ;-)

But actually the current QEMU should work with the buggy image as well.