[OpenBSD]

OpenBSD/sparc64

OpenBSD/sparc64 runs on the 64bit Sun UltraSPARC machines based on the UltraSPARC I, II, and III processors.

A mailing list dedicated to the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 ports is available at sparc@openbsd.org. To join the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe sparc" to majordomo@openbsd.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

The current port maintainer is Mark Kettenis (kettenis@openbsd.org). Others are definitely welcome to contribute!

Table of contents

History:

The original 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.

OpenBSD 3.0 was the first official release of OpenBSD/sparc64, and since that release support for many more devices has been added (including devices required for X11R6 support). The rest of the architectures that OpenBSD supports have benefitted because some kinds of bugs are exposed more often by the 64-bit big endian nature of UltraSPARC.

Sun refused access to the neccessary documentation for the (very bizzare) host bridge and caches in the UltraSPARC III machines, so a few years were lost before some reverse engineering figured out the changes in these machines (and the undocumented processor bugs, too). In 2007, Sun was finally convinced to release the missing information, and development progress became more rapid.

OpenBSD 4.0 was the first release to ship with support for the UltraSPARC III based machines.

And since there are always little bits missing, work is continuing...

Current status:

Currently most of the hardware available to the developers boots multiuser and supports enough of the on-board devices to be generally usable.

The X Window System is supported on most systems. Only the ATI graphics adapters are supported with the accelerated X.Org server at the current time. It is possible to use X in frame buffer mode with all supported SBus cards, as well as the on-board ATI graphics or the UPA Creator, Creator 3D or Elite 3D at the boot resolution/depth using the wsfb(4) driver.

The directions on how to enable the accelerated and unaccelerated X server are present in the /usr/X11R6/README file on the installed system.

Projects (in no particular order):

Supported hardware:

Supported machines

OpenBSD/sparc64 has been tested on the following machines:

  • Ultra 1/1E
  • Ultra 2
  • Ultra 5/10
  • Ultra 30/60/80
  • SPARCengineUltra AX
  • SPARCengineUltra AXe
  • SPARCengineUltra AXi
  • SPARCengine CP1500
  • Enterprise 150
  • Enterprise 220R
  • Enterprise 250
  • Enterprise 420R
  • Enterprise 450
  • Enterprise 3000/4000/5000/6000
  • Enterprise 3500/4500/5500/6500
  • Enterprise 10000
  • Sun Blade 100/150
  • Sun Blade 1000/1500/2000/2500
  • Sun Fire V100/V120
  • Sun Fire V125
  • Sun Fire V210/V240/V440
  • Sun Fire V215/V245
  • Sun Fire V250
  • Sun Fire 280R
  • Sun Fire V480/V880
  • Netra X1
  • Netra 20/T4
  • Netra 120
  • Netra 210/240/440
  • Netra T1 100/105
  • Netra T1 AC200/DC200
  • Netra T 1100
  • Netra T 1120/1125
  • Netra T 1400/1405
  • Momentum Leopard-V
  • RDI/Tadpole Ultrabook 170/200

Please note, some machines like the Ultra1, Ultra2 and Enterprise 220R may require upgrading the flashprom before OpenBSD can be successfully installed.

Supported devices

Unsupported machines

  • Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation
  • Ultra 25/45
  • Netra 1280/1290
  • Netra T2000
  • Netra CP3260/CP3060
  • Sun Blade T6300/T6320
  • Sun Fire V445
  • Sun Fire V490/V890
  • Sun Fire V1280
  • Sun Fire T1000/T2000
  • Sun Fire 3800/4800/4810/6800
  • Sun Fire E2900/E4900/E6900
  • Sun Fire 12K/15K
  • Sun Fire E20K/E25K
  • Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000/T2000
  • Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220

Unsupported devices

Hardware documentation:

Previous to 2007, it was extremely difficult or impossible to get much of the neccessary hardware documentation for these machines. Members of our team (in particular David Gwynne) were instrumental in pressuring and convincing Sun to go back into their archives and dig up the data sheets that they had written in-house, describing the operation of their chips to their own engineers. These documents can now be found at http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home. Some documents are still missing at that site, so we ask that interested developers contact Sun and request additional information.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/sparc64:

The latest supported OpenBSD/sparc64 release is OpenBSD 4.2. Here are the OpenBSD/sparc64 4.2 installation instructions .

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/sparc64 snapshot installation instructions as well.

There are several installation media provided, so that OpenBSD/sparc64 can be installed or upgraded via CD, floppy boot images on some models, miniroot images for machines without floppies, as well as network and diskless installs.

Please note that booting from floppy might not work on your machine; also, Ultra 1, 1E and 2 systems might require a PROM update (they usually don't if they are able to boot Solaris in 64bit-mode); please refer to the installation notes for details.

Supported platforms
www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: sparc64.html,v 1.260 2008/03/13 07:05:49 deraadt Exp $