[rescue] Sparc OS Install over serial

[Adam Kropelin]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
>> Hell, it shouldn't even be that hard.  All you *really* need to do is
>> make something that'll load a memory image over the serial port, and
>> use any generic Sparc Linux netboot image... they're a kernel plus a
>> ramdisk image.  Just load that into memory.  In fact, if you're
>> clever enough, you could put enough stuff into the ramdisk image to
>> start up a SLIP or PPP connection over the serial port, and install
>> over that.
>
> I think you folks are making this harder than it needs to be.  The
> OpenBoot forth monitor includes commands for poking words into memory.
> All you really need is a VTserver-like tool that reads a bootable
> memory image (say, a kernel with a ramdisk image tacked behind it,
> like is the case with the OpenBSD miniroot kernel), converts it into
> OBP commands to poke that data into memory, and have it finally send
> a jump to have the sparc start executing code.

If the PROM can keep up with commands at 9600 baud you just need a script to
convert your binary into a series of PROM commands. Then just cat the darn
thing out the serial port. No "server" software needed.

--Adam