Yes I have managed to get the T4 booting from softraid using that guide
(it's the same one I linked to in my first email) but I was trying to
get it to boot directly from softraid correctly.
According to the final slides of
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2015-softraid-boot.pdf the
softraid boot should look something like this:
1) Looks for RAID partition with letter 'a' in disklabel
2) Reads second-stage ofwboot program from softraid meta data
(see slide 18 of linked paper)
Also, back in April Stefan Sperling wrote to @misc:
link: https://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg153125.html
A separate boot partition is not required.
The first stage boot loader is a Forth script which reads a second stage
(ofwboot) from the softraid meta data area. ofwboot will load a kernel
from RAID1 and CRYPTO volumes. See the last few slides in
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2015-softraid-boot.pdf
The install/upgrade scripts run installboot(8) to set this up.
The only differences to i386/amd64 is that bootable sparc64 RAID
partitions must use the letter 'a' (the first stage does not try any
other letters) and that the boot-device and boot-file open firmware
environment variables must
be set up correctly (see boot_sparc64(8)).
I am trying to boot the T4 as Stefan has described, but it is not
working, I keep getting that softraid error code 19. It is clearly
stated in the man pages that sparc64 requires bootable RAID chunks to be
partition 'a' whereas that brycev.com guide has the RAID partitions on
partition 'd'. This does seem to contravene the guidelines set forth in
the man pages and the advice given by Stefan.
link: https://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg153125.html
Any ideas?
Jordan Geoghegan
On 12/26/17 13:30, OLD wrote:
I haven't clean installed 6.2 yet, upgraded since 5.9. But back in 5.9
days the bootloader was not able to boot from softraid. You had to
have a boot partition on each disk in the array, and that partition
must be partition A. I then added some shutdown scripts to sync the
kernel and ofwboot on every shutdown / reboot.
I followed this guide
http://brycv.com/blog/2012/openbsd-sparc64-and-root-on-softraid/
some of the commands have moved since that guide was created.
