On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 09:20:11PM -0000, eeh@netbsd.org wrote:
> 	My ultra1 seems to be the only thing around with a floppy, so I tried
> 	re-compiling my kernel... the following diff is needed to find fd.c,
> 	but it doesn't compile:
> 
> As you may have noticed, the floppy is not supported on sparc64.
> Since since many machines can't boot from it, it's too small to
> hold any really useful data, and it's usually faster and more
> convenient to move data over the network, I don't consider the
> floppy driver worth bothering with.  

While I don't disagree with any of these points, I thought I might
point out one bit of information.  Sun has standalone executable
environments that can upgrade the code in flash proms on the machine
to update the diagnostic and OpenBoot software.  I am pretty sure
that they have versions of this for all the UltraSparc based machines
-- certainly the Ultra1, Ultra2, Ultra60, 5, 10 and probably others.

Once you have these files, it is pretty easy to make it work.  (I
did dozens of these upgrades at my previous job.)  There are several
important bugs fixed -- one having to do with autonegotiation on
the ethernets (very useful if you are netbooting!) and one that
fixes the prom code to allow for booting from a floppy.

While it's probably not worth trying to make it boot from floppy
except for a really desperate install attempt, you can at least make
it possible to boot from floppy.

On a side note, I am pretty sure that you cannot (and will not be
able to) boot from floppy on the latest UltraSparcIIe based machines.
On the other machines, it was bug that prevented it -- on the newer
machines, its designed to not work :-(

-Kurt