Subject: Re: Disk formatting and labelling under NetBSD/sparc?
To: Greg Earle <earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US>
From: Dennis Ferguson <dennis@jnx.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 04/17/1996 10:05:16
> > After some fooling around I have NetBSD booting on a SPARCstation LX.
>
> Can you define "fooling around"? We have a spare LX here at work that's
> currently doing yeoman duty as a Solaris 2.5 test mule, but after that
> effort is over ...
The first problem is probably unique to me, and was that I using a too-old
SunOS 4.1.3 /boot and bootblock which just didn't work on the LX. The NetBSD
/boot and bootblock work fine.
The second problem was that the ethernet on the LX has two media connectors,
a 10baseT connector and a non-standard AUI connector, but the le driver
has no idea about how the media selection is done and the 10baseT
connector was never alive when I booted. The workaround hack I
used was to catch the machine in the boot prom as it was booting, and then
do a
boot net-tpe [initializes ethernet]
<L1><A> [stop doing that]
boot disk
but obviously this needs to be fixed in the driver.
> "LX won't boot SunOS the way it is"? I've never heard of an LX that
> couldn't boot SunOS ... why not slap a CD-ROM drive on it and boot off
Sorry, lack of clarity. I wasn't referring to SunOS in general, just the
4.1.3 version which is the only version I have. Mine seems to predate the
sun4m.
Dennis Ferguson