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

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

On Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:27:01 +1100
matthew green <mrg%eterna23.net@localhost> wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> can you try a tools "nbdisklabel" instead of the one in /sbin
> 
> the native one has features that may be the problem.
> 
> 
> .mrg.

I should have mentioned this previously, I did try it but it still
failed to create a new label. 

tools.sparc64/bin/nbdisklabel -B be -M sparc64 -e -I /dev/vnd0
nbdisklabel: could not read existing label

Running ktruss shows it opens /dev/vnd0 on fd=3 then performs two reads
at offsets 0x2000 and 0x200, which contain all zeros, after which it
proclaims: "could not read existing label"

  1841   1841 nbdisklabel open("/dev/vnd0", 0, 0)  = 3
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel stop kernel
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel resume kernel
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel pread(0x3, 0x61a880, 0x2000, 0, 0) = 8192
       "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel pread(0x3, 0x7f7fff031ce0, 0x200, 0, 0) = 512
       "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel write(0x2, 0x7f7fff0318b0, 0xd) = 13
       "nbdisklabel: "
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel write(0x2, 0x7f7fff031990, 0x1d) = 29
       "could not read existing label"
  1841   1841 nbdisklabel write(0x2, 0x61a807, 0x1) = 1
       "\n"