An update after discussions with the newboot team. SPARC platforms and PPC/ODW are fairly similar with the OBP/OF piece in place. The newboot move to SPARC is on the roadmap, but they have no immediate plans to implement. This leaves with 2 choices.
The quickest path with the least amount of code change would be leveraging ufsboot as a binary to copy in krtld/unix/genunix and go. So use OF directly or GRUB2 to load a PPC based ufsboot. A more elegant way would be to integrate ufsboot/netboot into GRUB2. Some of the 2.5.1 code may be useful here but we have to verify. But this is not where newboot is going longterm. The other way would be to write a multiboot type of loader (ie; AMD64) more inline with the newboot arch, becoming less of in fact independent on OBP for callbacks. This would encompass a port of the ramdisk driver with multiboot loading krtld, etc and go. Benefits of portability are obvious and 2.5.1 levergae is less relevant. thoughts? This message posted from opensolaris.org
