Michael Shapiro writes:
> There are two technical issues with US-I:
>
> 1. The pink zone fix, which extends its hooks way beyond the US-I CPU module.
> To avoid lawyers rounding me up, I'll quote from the Solaris 7 boot.conf:
>
> # On systems containing 200MHz or lower UltraSPARC-I processors,
> # it is possible for a user to run a 64-bit program designed to exploit a
> # problem that could cause the processor to stall. Since 64-bit programs
> # cannot run on the 32-bit kernel, the 32-bit kernel is chosen as the
> # default boot file on these systems.
I know about this (as much as there is to know about this issue outside of
Sun :-), and have in fact run a 64-bit kernel on my Ultra-1/170E desktop
since Solaris 2.7 Beta days.
> 2. The fact that, in part due to (1), we EOL'd the 32-bit kernel on SPARC
> once US-I was EOL'd. We definitely do not want to bring back 32-bit
> sun4u kernels: that has a massive developer impact on the gate.
I never proposed bringing 32-bit sun4u back, just the tiny fixes needed to
revive 64-bit UltraSPARC-I.
> So one way to make this issue a bit more approachable is to think about
> bringing back a 64-bit only US-I with the boot.conf caveat effectively
> built-in
> and to see if that change could be very much limited to a small set of changes
> to spitfire.c. I'm not necessarily casting my vote "yes" yet, but this is a
It's not even that. Apart from not aborting if the boot code (i.e. ufsboot
or inetboot) detects an UltraSPARC-I CPU, all the other changes are
packaging and cleanup stuff without any effect on the code.
> way to at least look at the scope of this particular change without feeling
> like we have to have the entire ISA port discussion or bring back (1) and (2).
To simplify further discussion, I've put up a webrev of my proposed
changes. There are still a few open issues, but this is also only cleanup
work with no effect on the code:
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~ro/opensolaris/webrev/us1/webrev/
The code changes are restricted to two files:
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~ro/opensolaris/webrev/us1/webrev/usr/src/psm/promif/ieee1275/sun4u/prom_vercheck.c.udiff.html
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~ro/opensolaris/webrev/us1/webrev/usr/src/psm/stand/boot/sparc/common/boot_plat.c.udiff.html
and should obviously be completely harmless, though very beneficial to
those of us still trying to use the affected system :-)
Regards.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
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