Documentation/Platforms/SPARC

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Welcome to the SPARC homepage. This page contains news and resources for users looking to emulate sun4m or sun4u systems under QEMU.

Status

The table below gives the status of the SPARC machines available in QEMU and is correct as of QEMU 2.4:

Machine Status
sun4m Complete, supported
sun4u Beta, supported
sun4v Incomplete, unsupported

Installation

Debian/RedHat packages

Users should install the qemu-system-sparc package in order the use the SPARC system emulators provided by their distribution.

Building from source

By default QEMU will build both the qemu-system-sparc and qemu-system-sparc64 system emulators unless QEMU has been configured with a specific target list. If you are looking to build just the SPARC system emulators from source yourself, then pass the options --target-list="sparc-softmmu sparc64-softmmu" to QEMU's configure script.

Compatibility

The tables below show the results of testing various SPARC and SPARC64 guests in QEMU:

SPARC32:

Machine OS Notes
- - -

SPARC64:

Machine OS Notes
- - -

Timeline

SPARC emulation is gradually improving over time and newer versions of QEMU will run significantly better than older ones. For more detailed information, check your QEMU version against the table below:

Version Machine Feature
2.4 sun4u Fixes in OpenBIOS fix EBus enumeration under FreeBSD sparc64 in -nographic mode
2.4 * Significantly improved TCG performance for software TLB systems (including SPARC)
2.3 sun4m Fix Solaris 1.1.2 boot in OpenBIOS and multi-user mode in Solaris 9
sun4u Fix m48t59 MMIO access to allow guests to read the NVRAM clock correctly
2.2 sun4u Add ability to boot NetBSD sparc64 and OpenBSD sparc64 in -nographic mode
2.1 sun4u Fixes for APB PCI bridge and added IOMMU implementation
2.0 sun4m Add cg3 framebuffer implementation primarily to support older Solaris versions
1.7 sun4m Add TCX FCode ROM for framebuffer (allows TCX adapter to boot Sun PROM in graphics mode)

Useful links

This page details how to set up a basic Debian SPARC image in QEMU.

Artyom has contributed several patches to improve SPARC emulation under QEMU and has lot of related information, particularly for users trying to run Solaris images under emulation. Some of the content is a little out of date (OpenBIOS should work with practically all Solaris versions now) but the FAQ is very helpful indeed.

Torbjörn uses QEMU to build and test the GNU GMP libraries on various platforms, and while the information is a little out of date, there are some useful configurations listed on the page.

This page contains a description of how to take an SS-20 Solaris image from a physical machine and run it under QEMU.

Olivier Danet has implemented a sun4m machine in an FPGA which is capable of booting many SPARC32 OSs, and as a consequence has provided several patches to fix bugs in SPARC32 emulation (and also OpenBIOS)

OpenBIOS is the Open Firmware implementation used by QEMU for SPARC32/SPARC64 (and indeed also for PPC)

Neozeed's fun with virtualisation blog has several useful articles on booting various OSs (including SPARC) under QEMU.


Contact

Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>