Re: No surprise with the boot process on the SPARC S7-2

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 24 Oct 2026 11:25:23 -0400
Dennis Clarke <dclarke%blastwave.org@localhost> wrote:

> Perhaps the only way forwards is to create a whole disk image elsewhere
> and then somehow present that to the LDOM. Far far more work than should
> be required at this point. Let's just say that something boots and then
> the installer is a horror show and maybe there is a way forwards. Maybe.

As I mentioned previously, avoid NetBSD sysinst. Manual install is
quite simple and in fact it involves a few simple commands that you
could easily copy and paste in under a minute.

The only issue is that NetBSD disklabel appears to be buggy and fails
to write sparc64 label on little-endian machines, so it needs to be
done on another sparc64 machine running NetBSD.

dd if=/dev/zero of=disk0.img bs=1m count=2048
vnconfig -v vnd0 disk0.img

disklabel -B be -M sparc64 -e -I vnd0
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:   3145728         0     4.2BSD      0     0     0
 b:   1048576   3145728     swap        0     0
 c:   4194304   0           unused      0     0

newfs -B be -O 2 /dev/rvnd0a && mount /dev/vnd0a /mnt

cd netbsd_sparc64_sets
for i in base etc kern-GENERIC misc modules rescue text
do
  tar -C /mnt -xpf ${i}.tgz
done && (cd /mnt/dev && ./MAKEDEV all)
sync

cat > /mnt/etc/fstab << 'EOF'
ROOT.a    /           ffs       rw,noatime    1 1
ROOT.b    none        swap      sw,dp         0 0
kernfs    /kern       kernfs    rw
procfs    /proc       procfs    rw
ptyfs     /dev/pts    ptyfs     rw
tmpfs     /var/shm    tmpfs     rw,-m1777,-sram%25
EOF

installboot -m sparc64 /dev/rvnd0c /mnt/usr/mdec/bootblk
cp -a /mnt/usr/mdec/ofwboot /mnt
umount /mnt && vnconfig -u vnd0

scp disk0.img user@solaris_control_domain: