OpenBSD/sparc64

OpenBSD/sparc64 runs on the 64-bit Sun UltraSPARC machines based on the UltraSPARC I, II, III, IV, T1 and T2 processors and the Fujitsu SPARC64 machines based on the SPARC64-V, SPARC64-VI and SPARC64-VII processors.

A mailing list dedicated to the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 ports is available at sparc@openbsd.org. To join the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe sparc" to majordomo@openbsd.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

The current port maintainer is Mark Kettenis (kettenis@openbsd.org). Others are definitely welcome to contribute!

Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Supported hardware
• Hardware documentation
• Getting and installing OpenBSD/sparc64

History:

The original port was made for NetBSD by Eduardo Horvath and released for the first time in January 1999. The porting to OpenBSD started in August 2001 and in the end of September the first binary snapshot was released. The porting was done mainly by Jason Wright and Artur Grabowski and was done on both SBus and PCI machines so that a decently wide range of hardware support was ready even before the system could boot multiuser.

OpenBSD 3.0 was the first official release of OpenBSD/sparc64, and since that release support for many more devices has been added (including devices required for X11R6 support). The other architectures that OpenBSD supports have benefited because some kinds of bugs are exposed more often by the 64-bit big endian nature of UltraSPARC.

Sun refused access to the necessary documentation for the (very bizarre) host bridge and caches in the UltraSPARC III machines, so a few years were lost before some reverse engineering figured out the changes in these machines (and the undocumented processor bugs, too). In 2007, Sun was finally convinced to release the missing information, and development progress became more rapid.

OpenBSD 4.0 was the first release to ship with support for the UltraSPARC III based machines; OpenBSD 4.3 first with SMP support, and OpenBSD 4.4 has been the first to support the UltraSPARC IV, UltraSPARC T1, UltraSPARC T2, SPARC64-V, SPARC64-VI and SPARC64-VII processors.

And since there are always little bits missing, work is continuing...

Current status:

Currently most of the hardware available to the developers boots multiuser and supports enough of the on-board devices to be generally usable.

The X Window System is supported on most systems. Accelerated drivers are available for ATI graphics adapters, Tech Source graphics adapters and the UPA Creator, Creator 3D and Elite 3D. It is possible to use X in frame buffer mode with all supported SBus cards, as well as the on-board ATI graphics, the UPA Creator, Creator 3D or Elite 3D, and the Expert 3D at the boot resolution/depth using either the wsfb(4) or the wildcatfb(4) driver.

The directions on how to enable the accelerated and unaccelerated X server are present in the /usr/X11R6/README file on the installed system.

Supported hardware:

Supported machines

OpenBSD/sparc64 is known or expected to work on the following machines:

OpenBSD 4.4 may trigger a hardware fault on the SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 that can only be cleared by a field engineer. A workaround for this problem is available in OpenBSD 4.5 and later.

Onboard gigabit Ethernet on the SPARC Enterprise T5140/T5240/T5440, Netra T5440 and Blade T6340 is unsupported.

The PRIMEPOWER 650/850 machines are only supported with SPARC64-V CPUs.

Please note, some machines like the Ultra1, Ultra2, Enterprise 220R and SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 may require upgrading the flashprom before OpenBSD can be successfully installed. The SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 needs at least OBP 4.28.0.

Supported devices

• Processors
  • Sun UltraSPARC I
  • Sun UltraSPARC II, IIi, IIe
  • Sun UltraSPARC III, III+, IIIi
  • Sun UltraSPARC IV, IV+
  • Sun UltraSPARC T1
  • Sun UltraSPARC T2, T2+
  • Fujitsu SPARC64-V
  • Fujitsu SPARC64-VI
  • Fujitsu SPARC64-VII
• Keyboards/Mice
  • Type 4, 5, and 6 keyboards on Zilog serial ports (zskbd)
  • Type 4, 5, and 6 keyboards on NS16550 serial ports (comkbd)
  • Type 6 and 7 keyboards on USB (ukbd)
  • PS/2 AT keyboards (pckbd)
  • Sun mice on Zilog (zstty) or NS16550 (com) serial ports
  • Sun mice on USB (ums)
  • PS/2 mice (pms)
• Frame buffers
  • SBus Video:
    • bwtwo - monochrome, unaccelerated
    • cgthree - 8-bit color, unaccelerated
    • cgsix - 8-bit color, accelerated
    • cgtwelve - 24-bit color, accelerated (but the driver does not support hardware acceleration)
    • Fujitsu AG-10e (agten) - 24-bit color, accelerated (currently only supported in unaccelerated 8-bit mode)
    • Parallax XVideo and PowerVideo (tvtwo) - 24-bit color, accelerated (but the driver does not support hardware acceleration)
    • RasterFlex family (rfx) - 8/24-bit color, accelerated (currently only supported in unaccelerated 8-bit mode)
    • Southland Media Systems MGX and MGXPlus (mgx) - 24-bit color, accelerated (currently only supported in unaccelerated 8-bit mode)
    • Vigra VS10, VS11 and VS12 SBus frame buffers - 8-bit color, unaccelerated, selectable VGA and Sun-compatible video modes
    • ZX (aka Leo) - 8 or 24-bit color, overlay planes, double-buffered, 3-D acceleration
  • PCI Video:
    • Sun PGX, PGX24 and PGX64 (machfb) - 8/24-bit color, accelerated
    • Tech Source Raptor GFX-4M/8M (raptor) - 8/24-bit color, accelerated
    • Tech Source Raptor GFX-8P/Sun PGX32 (gfxp) - 8/24-bit color, accelerated
    • Sun XVR-100 and XVR-300 (radeonfb) - 8/24-bit color, accelerated
    • Sun Expert3D, Expert3D-Lite, XVR-500, XVR-600 and XVR-1200 (ifb) - 24-bit color, accelerated (currently restricted to 8-bit, unaccelerated on the XVR-500 and XVR-600, accelerated on the Expert3D, Expert3D-Lite and XVR-1200)
  • UPA Video:
    • Creator/Creator 3D/Elite 3D (creator)
• SCSI Host Adapters
  • SBus NCR53c9x adapters (esp)
  • SBus 10/100Mbit SunSwift Ethernet+SCSI cards, aka HME + FAS366 cards (esp)
  • SBus and PCI Qlogic adapters (isp)
  • PCI NCR53c8xx adapters (siop)
  • Adaptec AIC-7770, AIC-7850, AIC-7860, AIC-7870, AIC-7880, AIC-7890, AIC-7891, AIC-7892, AIC-7895, AIC-7896, AIC-7897 and AIC-7899 based PCI host adapters (ahc)
  • AMD Am53c974 PCscsi-PCI host adapters including the Tekram DC-390 (pcscp)
  • LSI Logic Fusion-MPT (Symbios Logic/NCR) (mpi)
    • LSI53C1020, LSI53C1020A, LSI53C1030, LSI53C1030T, LSI53C1035,
    • LSIFC909, LSIFC919, LSIFC919X, LSIFC929, LSIFC929X, LSIFC949, LSIFC949X,
    • LSISAS1064, LSISAS1064E, LSISAS1068, LSISAS1068E
  • Areca Technology Corporation PCI-X and PCI Express Sata RAID controllers (arc)
• PCI IDE Controllers (pciide)
  • Acer Labs M5229
  • CMD Technology PCI0646, PCI0680
  • National Semiconductor PC87415
  • Promise PDC20262, PDC20267, PDC20268
  Other PCI IDE adapters may work, but are untested.
• CD-ROM and DVD-ROM Drives (cd)
  • Most SCSI CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD and DVD-RW drives.
  • Most ATAPI (IDE) CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD and DVD-RW drives.
• Ethernet Adapters
  • onboard SBus AMD Lance Ethernet (le)
  • SBus AMD Lance cards (le)
  • SBus 10/100Mbit qec+be Sun FastEthernet 1.0 cards (qec/be)
  • SBus Quad 10Mbit qec+qe Sun Quad Ethernet (qec/qe)
  • onboard SBus and PCI HME Ethernet (hme)
  • SBus 10/100Mbit hme Ethernet cards (hme)
  • SBus 10/100Mbit SunSwift Ethernet+SCSI cards (hme)
  • SBus Quad 10/100Mbit hme and qfe Quad Fast Ethernet cards (hme)
  • SBus Gigabit Ethernet 1.0/1.1 (ti)
  • SBus Gigabit Ethernet 2.0 (gem)
  • PCI Fast Ethernet (hme)
  • PCI Quad Fast Ethernet (hme)
  • PCI Gigabit Ethernet 1.0/1.1 (ti)
  • PCI Gigabit Ethernet 2.0 (gem)
  • PCI GigaSwift Ethernet (cas)
  • Alteon Tigon I/II-based adapters (ti)
  • Digital DC21x4x-based PCI adapters (de)
  • Davicom DM9102 Ethernet (dc)
  • Intel 21145-based adapters (dc)
  • Intel i8255x-based (except the i82556) adapters (fxp)
  • 3Com 3c9xx EtherLink XL adapters (xl)
  • SMC 83C170 ("EtherPower II") (EPIC/100) (epic)
  • AMD PCnet-based PCI adapters (pcn)
  • Intel PRO/1000 based adapters (em)
  • Broadcom BCM57xx/BCM590x (a.k.a. Tigon3) based PCI adapters (bge)
  • Broadcom NetXtreme II based PCI adapters (bnx)
  • Sundance/Tamarack TC9021 based PCI adapters (stge)
  • RealTek 8129/8139-based adapters (rl)
  • Realtek 8169/8169S/8110S based PCI adapters (re)
  • SysKonnect XMAC II and Marvell Yukon based PCI adapters (sk)
  • Tehuti Networks 10Gb based PCI adapters (tht)
  • ADMtek AN986-based USB adapters (aue)
  • ASIX Electronics AX88172 based USB adapters (axe)
  • CATC USB-EL1210A-based USB adapters (cue)
  • Davicom DM9601 USB Ethernet adapters (udav)
  • Kawasaki LSI KL5KUSB101B-based USB adapters (kue)
  • Realtek RTL8150L based USB adapters (url)
• Wireless Ethernet Adapters
  • Atheros IEEE 802.11a/b/g PCI/CardBus adapters (ath)
  • Atheros IEEE 802.11a/g/n PCI/CardBus adapters (athn)
  • Atheros USB IEEE 802.11a/b/g USB adapters (uath)
  • Atmel AT76C50x IEEE 802.11b USB adapters (atu)
  • Conexant/Intersil Prism GT Full-MAC IEEE 802.11a/b/g PCI adapters (pgt)
  • Marvell Libertas IEEE 802.11b/g Compact Flash adapters (will be detected as PCMCIA adapters) (malo)
  • Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11a/g/n PCI/CardBus adapters (ral)
  • Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11b/g USB adapters (ural)
  • Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11a/b/g USB adapters (rum)
  • Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11a/g/n USB adapters (run)
  • TI ACX100/ACX111 IEEE 802.11a/b/g PCI adapters (acx)
  • WaveLAN/IEEE, PRISM 2-3, and Spectrum24 IEEE 802.11b PCMCIA/PCI/USB (wi)
• WAN Adapters
  • SBE (formerly Lan Media Corporation) SSI (T1)/HSSI/DS1/DS3 WAN interfaces (lmc)
• Universal Serial Bus (USB) Devices
  • USB Audio (uaudio)
  • USB Diamond MultiMedia Rio MP3 players (urio)
  • USB Ethernet adapters ( aue, axe, cue, kue, udav, url) see above
  • USB Generic Human Interface Devices (catch-all) (uhid)
  • USB Handspring Visor (uvisor)
  • USB Hubs (uhub)
  • USB Keyboards (ukbd)
  • USB Mass Storage devices, i.e., USB floppy drives and USB memory stick controllers (umass)
  • USB Mice (ums)
  • USB Modems (umodem)
  • USB Printers (ulpt)
  • USB-USB cables (upl)
  • USB Y@p phone (uyap)
• Sound Devices
  • onboard SBus CS4231 (audiocs)
  • onboard EBus/PCI CS4231 (audioce)
  • Trident 4DWAVE-DX/NX, Sis 7018, ALi M5451 (autri)
  • Ensoniq AudioPCI (eap)
  • ESS Solo-1 PCI AudioDrive (eso)
• Serial Devices
  • onboard SBus Zilog 8530 (zs)
  • onboard EBus Infineon (Siemens) 82532 (sab)
  • onboard 16550 compatibles (com)
  • SBus magma serial port cards, including: 4Sp, 8Sp, 12Sp, 16Sp, LC2+1Sp, 2+1Sp, 4+1Sp, 8+2Sp, 2+1HS Sp (magma)
  • SBus spif serial port cards (spif)
  • Aurora SBus sio2/pio1 (asio/apio)
  • PCI serial/parallel communication cards (puc)
• Cryptography Accelerators
  • Hifn 6500 (lofn)
  • Hifn 7751/7811/7951/7955/7956-based boards (hifn)
  • Bluesteelnet 5501/5601, Broadcom uBsec 5801/5802/5805/5820/5821/5822/5823 (ubsec)
• PC Cards (PCMCIA)
  • PCMCIA Controllers:
    • SBus PCMCIA bridge (stp)
  • Wireless Ethernet Adapters:
    • See above.
• Radio Receiver Devices (radio)
  • D-Link DSB-R100 USB radio device (udsbr)
• Miscellaneous Devices
  • EBus beeper (beeper)
  • performance counters/system controller (uperf)
  • FireHose controller (fhc)
  • Central controller (central)
  • Clock board (clkbrd)
  • SBus Expansion Subsystem (SUNW,xbox) (xbox) [Currently restricted to non-DMA devices]
  • onboard floppy drive on SBus systems (such as Ultra 1 and Ultra 2) (fdc)
  • Hardware monitoring sensors, including:
    • Analog Devices AD7416, AD7417 and AD7418 (adc)
    • Analog Devices ADM1021 (admtemp)
    • Analog Devices ADM1024 (admlc)
    • Analog Devices ADM1025 (admtm)
    • Analog Devices ADM1030 (admtmp)
    • Analog Devices ADM1031 (admtt)
    • Analog Devices ADT7460 (adt)
    • National Semiconductor LM75, LM77 (lmtemp)
    • National Semiconductor LM78, LM78-J, LM79 (lm)
    • National Semiconductor LM87 (lmenv)
    • Maxim DS1624/DS1631/DS1721 (maxds)
    • Maxim MAX6642/MAX6690 (maxtmp)
    • Philips PCF8591 (pcfadc)
  • Meinberg Funkuhren radio clocks, including:
    • GPS170PCI 3.3V/5V 6-channel GPS receiver card (mbg)
    • PCI32 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
    • PCI509 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
    • PCI511 3.3V/5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
  • UVC-compatible Video devices (uvideo)

Untested machines (please help us test!)

The following machines may work, but have never been tested:

Most of these machines will almost certainly just work. If you have one of these machines available for testing, please give it a try and tell us about the result.

Unsupported machines

The following machines do not run OpenBSD/sparc64 just yet:

Unsupported devices

• SBus cards other than those listed above.
• PCI video cards other than those listed above.

Hardware documentation:

Getting and installing OpenBSD/sparc64:

The latest supported OpenBSD/sparc64 release is OpenBSD 5.4. Here are the OpenBSD/sparc64 5.4 installation instructions .

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/sparc64 snapshot installation instructions as well.

There are several installation media provided, so that OpenBSD/sparc64 can be installed or upgraded via CD, floppy boot images on some models, miniroot images for machines without floppies, as well as network and diskless installs.

• CD boot

  Booting off the CD provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel containing drivers for the most popular devices found on UltraSPARC hardware.
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK kernel configuration file. The CD can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with

    boot cdrom
  

• Floppy A (floppy54.fs)

  Booting off the floppy provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel containing supporting the following sparc64 hardware:

  • Ultra 1/1E
  • Ultra 2

  as well as support for the on-board devices found on these machines. However due to lack of space there are only a few other drivers. In particular, this floppy lacks cdrom support and will not allow installation from cdrom media. For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISKU1 kernel configuration file. The floppy can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with

    boot floppy
  

• Floppy B (floppyB54.fs)

  Booting off the floppy provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel containing supporting the following sparc64 hardware:

  • SPARCengineUltra AX
  • SPARCengineUltra AXe
  • SPARCengineUltra AXi

  as well as support for the on-board devices found on these machines. However due to lack of space there are only a few other drivers. In particular, this floppy lacks cdrom support and will not allow installation from cdrom media. For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISKU5 kernel configuration file. The floppy can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with

    boot floppy
  

• Miniroot (miniroot54.fs)

  The miniroot provides the same installation environment as the bootable CD, and is intended for easy bootstrap if there is already an operating system installed on the machine. After dumping the miniroot to the primary swap partition with dd, the miniroot can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with a command such as

    boot disk:b
  

  (the disk designation may be different, depending on the chosen swap partition).

• Network boot (ofwboot.net, bsd.rd)

  Using a diskless setup, it is also possible to boot the OpenBSD/sparc64 boot loader, ofwboot.net, from the network via tftp, and access the bsd.rd standalone miniroot over NFS. Refer to the diskless(8) manual page for details on how to setup a network boot environment.

Please note that booting from floppy might not work on your machine; also, Ultra 1, 1E and 2 systems might require a PROM update (they usually don't if they are able to boot Solaris in 64bit-mode); please refer to the installation notes for details.