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Re: developing on a sparc?
> Has anyone used a sparc as a host? I'm already using it for
> cross-compiling (configured for "m68k-unknown-aout"). But the
> lab may go pentium, and I'd like to switch to the os-kit.
Yes, cross compiling from any platform is no problem if you build a cross
compiler for an x86/ELF platform. Get your favorite versions of gcc or
egcs, and GNU binutils, and do something like:
configure --host=sparc-sun-solaris2.7 --target=i586-linux
(you can use linux or gnu or probably any ELF-based platform,
the only difference for the oskit will be what the tools are called).
> The target machines would have hard disks, PCI ether cards (but
> 16-bit ISA is possible) and monitors. I'd like to boot off the network
> if possible. Is this covered in the docs?
Yes, we have a `netboot' kernel documented in the manual that makes this
possible. What most of us do is install this on the hard disk using some
boot loader; many people have freebsd installed and use the freebsd boot
loader and booting a mkbsdimage'd netboot kernel from the freebsd
filesystem, myself I'm actually using GRUB and it boots netboot from an
MSDOS partition on the hard disk. You could also make some similar
arrangement on a floppy and boot netboot from that floppy.
However you get netboot going, it then uses BOOTP/DHCP to set up the
ethernet and gives you a command line to specify kernels to load by NFS.
If it would be helpful, we could provide a bootable floppy image containing
netboot. The reason we have not already done so is that one has to decide
which ethernet drivers to include in that netboot binary, and the more we
include the longer it takes to read the floppy (floppy drives just haven't
gotten faster the way everything else has!), and some ISA drivers may
conflict with each other.
OTOH, it just occurred to me that if we provide such an image and make it
an MSDOS floppy (which I can do with GRUB), then anybody with mtools (and
if you can't get mtools to work for you then you probably shouldn't be
hacking operating systems! ;-) could put it on a floppy and then replace
the netboot binary with the one from their oskit build that has the right
drivers for them. That should all be moderately painless.
I'll whip up a bootable MSDOS floppy image (with no MSDOS, don't worry)
containing a netboot that has all the PCI drivers and no ISA drivers, since
PCI drivers can get along with each other.
> I see messages about using LILO and rawrite. I can write 1.44 meg
> floppies, but don't have LILO on my sparc.... :-) Would I have
> to install Linux/Freebsd on the targets? I'd rather not, but doesn't
> seem like a big deal once it is done the first time....
There is no inherent need to, though if you plan to use a disk filesystem
usually the easiest way to populate and fsck it is by booting a real OS
where that filesystem type is native (e.g. freebsd or netbsd if using the
netbsd ffs or linux if using the linux fs code). (And note that it's
really wise to fsck every time your kernel crashes if it opened the disk at
all, and young oskit kernels tend to crash a lot).
Also, if you have any trouble with hardware/device drivers in the oskit, we
will probably ask you to try the native freebsd and/or linux kernel drivers
on your machines and show us what they say before trying to debug the oskit
drivers.
> BTW, I like having the COM interfaces through the system. You
> implementation has some real crafty code in it... very slick, wow!
We aim to bewilder.
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