Subject: Re: Reading Boot ROMS
To: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
From: Mark Dapoz <md@dementia.org>
List: port-sparc
Date: 09/16/1997 23:37:47
> Of course, if you're willing to open the case, you could just pull the
> chip and plug it into something designed to dump ROMs.  This is a more
> certain approach anyway - who knows but what they wired up the data
> leads to the chip backwards for the sake of board layout or something,
> thereby making the bits from the chip's point of view different from
> the bits from the CPU's point of view....

I would love to do that, unfortunatly the machine with the ROMs is a
server and can't be taken down.  I have however read my ROMs with the
burner and it doesn't appear they did anything fancy with them.  They
just split the code into 4 ROMs so that each ROM has one byte of a
32bit word.  I'm amazed that they have about 512K of ROM code!  I
figure these ROMs must show up at either the start or end of the
address space.  If I knew where the SPARC processor started executing
when powered on, then that would isolate the ROM location.  Does anyone
know what the startup sequence of the SPARC is?  The obvious vectors
at the start and end of the ROM don't seem to provide any clues.
			-mark