On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Justin Zygmont wrote:
On Tue, 20 Feb 2007, James Carlson wrote:
Andrew Pattison writes:
So am I right in saying that there is no easy way of getting a grub-like
boot menu on SPARC?
Not yet ...
How are you supposed to dual boot on a SPARC then? I have an ultra 5 with
aurora linux and solaris 10 that would a great candidate to try it. Can
solaris 10 work with SILO at all?
Solaris/sparc bootloading hasn't changed for Solaris 10. So you should be
able to boot it via SILO. Just the SILO configuration for this isn't that
trivial.
But it's not necessary to use SILO for booting Solaris. Instead, if SILO
is installed into a slice's bootsector (the "-t" command line option / the
"partition-boot" configuration file option) then you can simply use OBP's
command line to boot either the Solaris slice or the Linux/SILO slice.
Which is the suggested way of doing it. See the SILO docs:
http://www.sparc-boot.org/config.html
Under the description of the "Solaris" option.
Btw, OBP (the "ok prompt") is a mighty interface on its own. No
comparision to a "PC BIOS", especially wrt. to ways how to interact with
it. It knows about disks/partitioning/device trees, can do low-level and
hardware debugging, can load and run static standalone ELF executables
(that's what a bootloader actually is, unless it's written in Forth ...),
contains a complete Forth interpreter and the command line does Emacs-
style Ctrl+?? shortcuts for editing. You could write a boot menu in
Forth, store it in the machine's NVRAM and have it execute when starting
up. More of an academic exercise, though...
FrankH.
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
