OpenBSD/sparc64

OpenBSD/sparc64 runs on the 64bit Sun UltraSPARC machines. The current port maintainer is Jason Wright (jason@openbsd.org). Others are welcome to contribute.

History:

The orginal port was made for NetBSD by Eduardo Horvath and released for the first time in January 1999. The porting to OpenBSD started in August 2001 and in the end of September the first binary snapshot was released. The porting was done mainly by Jason Wright and Artur Grabowski and was done on both SBUS and PCI machines so that a decently wide range of hardware support was ready even before the system could boot multiuser.

Current status:

Currently most of the hardware available to the developers boots multiuser and supports enough of the on-board devices to be generally useable. No attempts have been made for graphics console support yet, so only serial or prom consoles are available. The same applies to support of more expansion hardware for the PCI bus or the SBUS.

There hasn't yet been a need for a separate mailing list for OpenBSD/sparc64, so the OpenBSD/sparc mailing list is being used. To join the OpenBSD/sparc mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe sparc" to majordomo@OpenBSD.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

Projects (in no particular order):

• X Window System support
• Resolve stability issues on Blade100
• Finish porting SBUS drivers from OpenBSD/sparc
• Improve architecture specific documentation

Where to get it:

• Snapshots are made available from time to time.
• Installation information

Install media:

A number of install options exist:

• CD boot:

  Booting off the CD provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel containing drivers for the most popular devices found on UltraSPARC hardware.
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK config file.

• Floppy disk:

  This 1.44MB floppy image supports the following sparc64 hardware:

  • Ultra 1/1E
  • Ultra 2
  It contains support for the on-board devices found on these machines, however due to lack of place there are only a few other drivers. In particular, this floppy lacks cdrom support and won't allow you to install from cdrom media.

• Miniroot:

  The miniroot is a complete filesystem image, to be dumped on your machines' swap partition, and booted from afterwards. Its device support is similar to the CD boot image.

Use the method that works best for you.
Please note that booting from floppy might not work on your machine; also, Ultra 1, 1E and 2 systems might require a PROM update; please refer to the installation notes for details.

Supported hardware:

OpenBSD/sparc64 has been tested on the following SUN UltraSPARC models:

• Ultra 1/1E
• Ultra 2
• Ultra 5
• Ultra 10
• Ultra 30
• SPARCengineUltra AX
• SPARCengineUltra AXi
• SUNBlade 100 (with onboard ethernet issues)
• Enterprise 250
• Netra X1 *

The following models are not supported at the moment:

• Ultra 60
• Ultra 80
• Ultra 450
• SUNBlade 1000
• Enterprise 220R
• Enterprise 420R
• Enterprise 450
• Enterprise 3000

Supported peripherals:

• SCSI Host Adapters
  • SBUS NCR53c9x adapters (esp)
  • SBUS 10/100Mbit SunSwift Ethernet+SCSI cards, aka HME + FAS366 cards (esp)
  • SBUS Qlogic adapters (isp)
  • PCI NCR53c8xx adapters (siop)
• PCI IDE Controllers (pciide)
  • Acer Labs M5229
  • Command Technologies PCI0646
  • National Semiconductor PC87415
  Other PCI IDE adapters may work, but are untested.
• Ethernet Adapters
  • onboard SBUS AMD Lance Ethernet (le)
  • SBUS AMD Lance cards (le)
  • SBUS 10/100Mbit qec+be Sun FastEthernet 1.0 cards (qec/be)
  • SBUS Quad 10Mbit qec+qe Sun Quad Ethernet (qec/qe)
  • onboard SBUS and PCI HME Ethernet (hme)
  • SBUS 10/100Mbit hme Ethernet cards (hme)
  • SBUS 10/100Mbit SunSwift Ethernet+SCSI cards (hme)
  • SBUS Quad 10/100Mbit hme and qfe Quad Fast Ethernet cards (hme)
  • PCI Fast Ethernet (hme)
  • PCI Quad Fast Ethernet (hme)
  • PCI GEM Ethernet (gem) [Not fully supported]
• Sound devices
  • onboard SBUS CS4231 (audiocs)
  • onboard EBUS/PCI CS4231 (audioce)
• Serial devices
  • onboard SBUS Zilog 8530 (zs)
  • onboard 16550 compatibles (com)
• Miscellaneous Devices
  • EBUS beeper (beeper)

Unsupported devices:

• Framebuffers (these will work as prom console output, but no X Windows support yet).
• Keyboards (these will work as prom console input, but no X Windows support yet).
• Mice (No X Windows support yet)
• SBUS and PCI cards other than those listed above.