sparc64 boot0

[Marius Strobl]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 11:35:38PM +0200, volker at vwsoft.com wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> I'm about to prepare boot media for a sparc64 installation (bought a 
> cheap used Blade 1500).
> 
> For amd64/i386 I usually do a bsdlabel -wB ...; newfs ; make 
> install{world|kernel} blablabla to get things on a bootable usb thumb drive.
> 
> I've already finished the cross build for TARGET_ARCH=sparc64 and am 
> wondering which boot0 I will want to use for the thumb drive to get the 
> Sun Blade booting?
> 

The disk layout of sun4u is way different from what you know from
x86, f.e. it doesn't use a boot0 at all but only a boot1, which in
the new world order is installed via gpart(8) just like on x86.
In order to label a disk for sun4u on x86 with gpart(8) you'd need
an x86 kernel built with options GEOM_PART_VTOC8 or the equivalent
module, which likely noone has tried so far. There are more obstacles
to what you are trying to though, f.e. FreeBSD isn't able to write
a big-endian UFS on x86, apart from the fact that Blade 1500 probably
don't support booting from USB drives ...
The straight-forward way to install cross-built kernel and userland
on a sun4u machine is to netboot it with them.

Marius