On Mon, 30 Jun 1997, Greg Earle wrote:

> What's involved with supporting the Fujitsu TurboSPARC chips?  Is it likely
> to be reasonably supported by 1.3?

Two clues,  these boxes boot SunOS 4.1.4 just fine, and they boot Solaris
5.5.1 just fine.  I don't believe either of these have extra code for the
TurboSPARC (I believe that's what the CPU in the 170MHz SS5's is called.)

Anyway, it's obvious there is some sort of emulation mode getting invoked, 
at least with SunOS 4.1.4

The question is, how does it work?  I can see two possibilities.  First,
they switch into an emulation mode automatically.  If this is the case,
then both Sparc Linux and NetBSD should boot fine, and neither does.  The
second is that there is code in the boot PROM that looks at the boot block
and switches on the emulation mode if it sees an OS such as 4.1.4 that
it knows does not support the TurboSPARC.  This seems a bit convoluted
to me.

I suspect it's simple once you know the secret.

Mike Miller             mke@netcom.com  
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