[rescue] Sun Ultra5 emulation, was: more sun2 adventures!

[JP Hindin]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2019, Jonathan Katz wrote:
> QEMU will emulate a sparc and you can run the SSP software on anything,
> even Sparc 5s or 20s.
>
> https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/SPARC

I did a search _after_ sending the eMail and discovered QEMU appears to 
support sun4u to some reasonable degree - enough there's screenshots of 
people with the Solaris installer running.

I am _certain_ I looked at QEMU 12-14 months ago and it was not in a 
workable state for sun4u. I simply assumed at the time there'd be no 
further development on it and stopped checking. I'm going to give this a 
try.

> When I was a wee lad we were told that the E10Ks just used JTAG and then it
> was JTAG encapsulated over TCP/IP once the Controllers in the E10K booted
> far enough and saw the SSPs.

This is correct (based on the E10ks documentation). I suspect there's 
probably few enough requests going back and forth that I could probably 
emulate a dead start without too much trouble (assuming I had a working 
SSP to watch). The OBP is pulled via tftpd and a combination of 
bootparamd/rarpd provides a lot of the help, which are, of course, 
still vaguely standard (read: installable, if not trivially buildable) 
utilities.

But if I go down that road it'll be yet one more impediment to going back 
to bringing up the E10k (I have gotten it to 32 CPUs and 20GB of RAM 
running) and I know myself too well.

Thank you!

  - JP

> On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 4:39 PM JP Hindin <jplist2008 at kiwigeek.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 6 Jan 2019, Walter Belgers wrote:
>>> harddisk, using the tme Sun emulator and original tapes. I have played
>> some
>>> more with tme, to try to install other versions of SunOS on a virtual
>> disk. It
>>> turns out that tme is - even after patching - quite picky. I could not
>> do a
>>
>> Greetings all;
>>
>> The post by Walter had me thinking laterally and I wanted to query the
>> list for thoughts. I hadn't even heard of tme, so I didn't know there was
>> a viable Sun emulator - although based on tme's documentation and Walter's
>> mail, it appears it is finicky.
>>
>> Is there software that would allow me to emulate a Sun Ultra 5 running
>> Solaris 7? I'd be willing to pay for it - although probably not $Infinite.
>> The Sun E10k uses an Ultra 5 as a front end system (SSP, System Service
>> Processor) and I've gone through two of them over the last few years (bad
>> PSU, and I'm not sure what's going on this time). While most of the SSP
>> tools are just fairly simple daemons sending commands via an ethernet
>> interface and I'm confident could be rewritten based on sniffing, I'm not
>> sure I'm that brave.
>>
>> But an emulator that would allow me to boot up a working disk image and
>> supported networking would be wonderful. I can lose x86 boxes to my
>> heart's content and never feel bad about it. Replacement parts are (for
>> the foreseeable future) plentiful, and so on.
>>
>> Does such a thing conveniently exist?
>>
>> My thanks;
>>
>>   - JP
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>>
>
>
> -- 
> -Jon
> +44 7792 149029
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue