9fans archive / 1998 / 11 / 80 /    prev next

From: Bengt Kleberg bengt.kleberg@swi...
Subject: [9fans] kfs on sparc
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:01:24 +0100

In article <199811110855.JAA331408@rel...>,
9fans@cse... wrote:

> > Finally, the entry for the sparc in BOOTING(8) only mentions
> > net booting. Can a Sun be made into a stand alone Plan9
> > workstation?
> 
> good question. making a SPARC kernel with kfs is easy (the
> Plan 9 FAQ even tells you how). booting that off the net is
> similarly easy. booting from a local disc... that part has
> escaped me. in the end i worked out that the only way it
> was going to work was if i left a minimal Solaris partition
> on my disc with the second- and third-stage boot loaders
> and replaced the Unix kernel with the Plan 9 one. sadly a
> friend had kindly installed Solaris 2.6 over Solaris 2.5 on
> my little old IPC, and the boot loader in 2.6 only supports
> ELF binaries.

The only way to boot from a disk is to have a boot loader that supports
plan9 kernels. Such a loader is installed if one use SunOS4 or OpenBSD
(and apperantly old versions of Solaris? I tried 2.5, but it did not work
for me)

What one can do on a Solaris system is to get hold of the following SunOS4
programs/data files:

/boot
/usr/kvm/mdec/installboot
/usr/kvm/mdec/bootsd

and do the following on a minimal 'a' partition (I had the /dev
compatibility package installed on Solaris) on _another_ disk, not the
Solaris boot disk:

mount /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 /mnt
cp /boot /mnt/boot
/usr/kvm/mdec/installboot /mnt/boot /usr/kvm/mdec/bootsd /dev/rsd1a
cp plan9kernel /mnt