I am getting an Ultra 5+ at work to replace my SPARCstation 20/71, now that
   1.5 is out.  I'm a little confused about how Ultra 5+ console support works.

OFW driver.
   
   Mike Cooper's excellent "sysinfo" returns the following on my officemate's
   Ultra 5+ system:
   
   [...]
       pci108e,a000(0) is a "Sun sabre" PCI
           simba0 is a "Sun PCI" PCI bus bridge
               ebus0 is a "Sun Microsystems PCI<->OnBoard" bus bridge
                   auxio is a "Auxiliary I/O"
                   power0
                   se0 is a "Siemens 82532 ESCC" serial device
                   su0 is a "82510/8250/16450/16550AF" serial device
                       kbd is a "Sun Type-5 US Unix" Keyboard
                   su1 is a "82510/8250/16450/16550AF" serial device
   		[...]
   
   Is the serial port console on the "se0" device?  Which is supported in 1.5?

there is no support for the serial ports.  there *is* support for an OFW
serial console.... that will work regardless of the underlying ic.
   
   (What the heck is a "sab", anyway?)

sab8253x serial chip, made my siemens.
   
   I'm going to assume that I'll be installing 1.5 on an external 9 Gb SCSI disk
   from Solaris (on the internal disk), but am wondering what's going to happen
   after that, when I want to boot up into NetBSD.  (I'm on a SPARCserver 20 here
   at home, running headless with a serial "zs" console that obviously works
   fine, and am wondering if I can do the same with the Ultra 5+.)


i've almost never used the ultra5 i did most of the work for PCI support
in any other mode than serial.  it works just fine :-)


.mrg.