Re: Writing OBP from Linux

[Eric Brower <ebrower@gmail.com>]

On 7/20/05, Turbo Fredriksson <turbo@debian.org> wrote:
> I usually do this via TFTP, but this time I don't want to do this
> for various reasons, so does anyone have the program to do the
> actuall writing of the OBP?
> 
> I already extracted the actuall flash image from the OBP patch
> (retreived from Sun) using the command in the message
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2002/11/msg00020.html.
> 
> I have the 'flash' module and the corresponding /dev/flash device,
> but now what!? Just 'dd' the extracted OBP to the device? Is that
> safe?

You can find the flash programming utility written by Eddie on the net
with a little searching-- here's a copy:

     http://kumba.drachentekh.net/sparc-linux/flash.c

I can't comment on whether it works properly. 

 If memory serves, there used to be bootable OBP updates available
from Sun as well-- I believe you could "boot net' them, or potentially
dd them to your swap partition and boot from there.  I don't really
recall well enough, though.

Also, the sun_uflash MTD driver can likely be made to find these chips
(it ignores them, currently)-- if you can mmap MTD devices these days,
or even if not, it might be nice to leverage that driver and write a
new application that leverages the MTD-based device driver.

E