Sun Open Firmware - insiders?

[Arno Kletzander]

[Firstly, excuse me for not taking part in the recent flame-pissing match.
I've been seeing valid points on both sides initially but can't accept any
of them any more due to the inconsiderate, impolite and unfair means they
were brought forward with. I can only second the following:
Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think it would be very unfortunate if the thing
> just died here and now. 
Back to publicly frustrating myself with Sun vs. PC boot problems ;-)]

Dan Williams <williams.dan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't really help you directly, but I have had no problems booting
> sun machines from windows using vmware and virtual pc. I also have
> netbsd installed on simh vax, which I used to boot an octane a while
> back. I guess that cygwin would probably do the job as well.
> Unless you really want to spend time playing with open firmwire, it
> might be easier.

It's already been suggested, but I strongly dislike the idea of pileing a
virtual machine and another OS on top of it all on the PC side (a humble
P90, btw) when the functionality that I need could be actually realized by
*simplifying* what the Sun is doing. I'll rather spend that time with open
firmware, as you said.

der Mouse <mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> wrote:
> > (...) Why does it have to obtain the machine's IP, that of the
> > tftp server and what else via rarp?
> 
> It can't obtain anything but its own address via rarp.  It normally
> gets its TFTP server's address via bootparams, I think, at least for
> older machines (newer ones may use something else for all I know).
> It's possible that it initially queries whoever answered its RARP, but
> if it gets no answer it broadcasts the query - and I think it
> broadcasts the TFTP request too if necessary.

Funny...I don't remember setting up a bootp(aram)d, I started getting tftp
requests as soon as the rarp table was setup. I also don't think the
requests were broadcast: I was running another machine ready to serve tftp
at the same time and that one didn't get any requests. I was even able to
shut down Linux after the rarp resolution (if tftp was disabled), bring the
same system up with Windows (under the same IP) and have the Sun slurp its
bootloader image from there.

> > I'm by no means a Sun expert yet, but as I've understood it, you can
> > define your own FCode commands and store them in NVRAM, so one could
> > modify the boot code to use parameters stored in environment
> > variables, either if a flag "use-stored-IP?" is set or as a fallback
> > if there's no rarp server around.
> 
> Yes, except that the space available in the NVRAM is fairly limited as
> I understand it.

That might indeed be a problem, although not necessarily.

> > I've already got myself a Forth book and the FCode manuals from Sun,
> > and I had a look at some commands with "see".  "see" however often
> > spits out hexadecimal codes in parenthesis amidst of Forth words and
> > I've yet to understand what they mean;
> 
> They appear to be some kind of headerless something.  There's one of
> the words internal to see that can deal with them - (see or some such -
> and you can use it as in
> 
> ok see foo
> ... (f28470c0) ...
> ok f284709c0 (see
> ... that word ...
> 
> (or whatever the internal word is - it's visible in "see see").

Yep, it's (see) - thank you. I may have tried that earlier but failed due to
not realizing this used postfix notation (contrary to see). It works and I'm
in course of building an indented listing of everything that happens after I
enter "boot".

It looks like I can initiating the execution of unnamed subroutine (f00...)
by entering f00... execute; any gotchas there?

Stan Barr <stanb at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> I can't really help directly. Even though I've used Forth for 25 yrs and
> have both Power Mac and Sun machines here I've not done much with Open
> Firmware.   You might try looking at http://www.openfirmware.org/ or
> http://playground.sun.com/1275/ and see if there are any useful links.

Thank you, those are quite promising resources; I think I've got something
to read over the holidays now... hopefully a few comments about how this
stuff is supposed to work.

So long,

-- 
Arno Kletzander
Stud. Hilfskraft Informatik Sammlung Erlangen
www.iser.uni-erlangen.de

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