Re: Boot fails on Sun Ultra 45

[Julian Coleman <jdc%coris.org.uk@localhost>]

Hi,

> Thank you for this idea.  I saw some posts about earlier Sun Ultra
> models having a limit of 4 gb for the root partition. I reinstalled
> with a boot partition of 4 gb, and the firmware was able to find all
> the files it needed to boot successfully.  Thanks to all for your
> help.

Glad to hear that it's working!

I added a note to the sparc64/boot manual page a while ago, after testing
on U1 and U2 machines.  See the bugs entry at the end of:

  https://man.netbsd.org/sparc64/boot.8

However, I didn't do testing on other machines with even larger disks.
The limits probably depend on both the model and the firmware version.
I'm not sure if the variable is 32bit (max 4GB) or larger.  If it's a
64-bit number, we shouldn't have any problems, but it seems that the
maximum is less than 2^39.

From a quick look at the OpenBSD bootblk.fth, I can't see any obvious
code differences that would change the behaviour between OpenBSD and
NetBSD (but I could be missing something).

Regards,

Julian