Martin Bochnig wrote: > Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck wrote: > >> ...and that is the key: leverage the OF! > > > > Exactly! > >> >> On Dec 23, 2005, at 8:28 PM, Tom Riddle wrote: >> >>> Thanks, one thing to keep in mind is that the ODW with OFW is >>> probably closer to a sparc based boot then an x86. We expect to sync >>> up with the newboot team shortly and get a bit of input as the move >>> newboot onto sparc progresses. >> >> > > Moving "newboot" onto sparc? > Why would you ever want to do this? > Mmmh. > > Doesn't make too much sense imho, because no buggy bunch of 100 and 1 > different BIOS'es needs to be worked around here. > There already exists _one_ standardized, stable and powerful firmware- > and boot- interface: OBP. > I don't want to miss the classical OBP boot environment on my Blades and > Fires. > I'll stick with the old OpenSolaris boot code then in order to get the > old behaviour on newer nevada releases. > Do me another favour pls.: Don't switch the console to white text on > black background. > Or offer choice. > > Some history and resulting questions: > At first you had sparc and OBP (ignoring the Motorola 68k pre-history > for simplicity). > Then - when moving Solaris 2.4 to x86 and 2.5beta/5.1/6beta to ppc - you > tried to emulate OF as much as necessary (in case of DCA on x86) and > almost as much as possible (VOF 1.x and 2.x on ppc) in order to maintain > the single Solaris os_net src tree. > VOF is quite cool, I love it. > > Then, 8 years later, you might have had licensing issues with > pre-newboot/dca on x86 when preparing the OpenSolaris launch in Q2'05, ok. > I guess you also wanted to finally get rid of a realmode MS-DOS alike > Bootloader (I mean DOS, not only TextInterface) that even had to be > built in a DOS-environment with some vintage 16bit MASM. > Instead of porting VOF back to x86 (its initial roots look like > dca_x86) you decided to slightly enhance GRUB (first old, then new > GRUB) and to stick with it for x86/x64. > Understandable, as this went rather cheap and fast and as no annoying > licensing issues occurred as potentially with VOF (IBM ? ). > > Same reasons may apply for the ongoing Polaris port. > So Grub again, ok. > Dennis and others did a great job there. > > But on sparc? > Why. > Did I overlook something?
Yes, Unified Solaris boot architecture. It makes sense to boot Solaris very same way across all of the supported architectures. The GRUB approach also tends to simplify boot process a bit (well, mostly by moving the problematic part into some other realm ;) ) > > > Happy holidays to the ml, > martin > _______________________________________________ > powerpc-discuss mailing list > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org >
