Bug#243120: boot failure on sparc32 (Ultra1)

[Vincent McIntyre <Vince.McIntyre@atnf.csiro.au>]

I finally made some more tests, with netinst 20041024
(http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/sparc/20041024/sarge-sparc-netinst.iso)

Power up, boot into solaris.
Ran 'memconf' to discover the memory layout.
This showed:
  U701, U601, U703, U603   had 64Mb DIMMs installed
  U702, U602, U704, U604   were empty

# reboot
Stop-A during "Initializing memory" step
insert cdrom
ok boot cdrom
Initializing memory /
SILO 1.4.8
 Fast Data Access MMU miss

ok reset
Stop-A during "boot: disk" step
ok boot cdrom
 Fast Data Access MMU miss
(NB, no SILO banner)

power down
power up
Stop-A during  "boot: disk" step
ok boot cdrom
 Fast Data Access MMU miss
(no SILO banner)

ok boot cdrom
 Fast Data Access MMU miss
(no SILO banner)
ok reset
Stop-A _between_ "initializing memory" and "boot: disk" steps
SILO 1.4.8
 Fast Data Access MMU miss


A note on the 32/64 question. The sparc chip in these boxes is indeed
64-bit. However apparently there were some errors in the chip design
that forced Sun to make Solaris run in 32-bit mode.
Maybe linux does not have this problem?
Or maybe there is a PROM setting that needs tweaking, to force 64-bit?

Hope this is of some use.