[Sunhelp] 64-bit OS

[Bill Bradford]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 10:14:23AM -0800, John Kennedy wrote:
> I had already done the flashprom update thing but we have since wiped
> and reloaded the system.  Do I need to redo the flashprom update to
> enable this???
> Thanks,
> John

>From "man boot":

  Booting UltraSPARC Systems
     Certain platforms may need a firmware  upgrade  to  run  the
     64-bit  kernel.   See  the  Sun  Hardware Platform Guide for
     details. If the 64-bit kernel  packages  are  installed  and
     boot  detects that the platform needs a  firmware upgrade to
     run 64-bit, boot  displays a  message  on  the  console  and
     chooses the 32-bit kernel as the default file instead.

     On systems containing 200MHz or lower  UltraSPARC-1  proces-
     sors,  it  is  possible  for  a user to run a 64-bit program
     designed to exploit a problem that could cause  a  processor
     to stall. Since 64-bit progams cannot run on the 32-bit ker-
     nel, the 32-bit kernel is chosen as  the  default   file  on
     these  systems.

     The code sequence that exploits the problem is very  unusual
     and  is  not likely to be generated by a compiler. Assembler
     code had to be specifically written to demonstrate the prob-
     lem.  It  is  highly  unlikely that a legitimate handwritten
     assembler routine would use this code sequence.

      Users willing to assume the risk that a user might acciden-
     tally  or  deliberately  run  a program that was designed to
     cause a processor to stall may choose to run the 64-bit ker-
     nel    by    modifying   the   boot    policy   file.   Edit
     /platform/platform-name/boot.conf so  that  it  contains  an
     uncommented     line     with     the     variable     named
     ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU set to the value true
     as shown in the example that follows:

     ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU=true

     For more information, see the Sun Hardware Platform Guide.

I just did this yesterday on an Ultra1.  Works fine.

Bill

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|Bill Bradford          | mrbill at pdp11.org     | mrbill at mrbill.net    |
|http://www.sunhelp.org | http://www.pdp11.org | http://www.mrbill.net|
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