Installing Solaris 2.4 on Qemu SPARC

This is a super simple guide, that is far from complete on the installation of Solaris 2.4 on Qemu's SPARC emulator.

As of May 2010, the needed changes to Qemu have *NOT* been released into a public version of Qemu, but rather are available in the source repository. Once a version is released post 0.12.4 it should be all in there.

Some of the things you'll need:

• ss5.bin
• solaris.disk.gz
• You will also need an ISO of a Solaris 2.4 CD-ROM. You'll need to use cdread, from the mkiosfs package to get the whole thing!

Building Qemu

Using GIT to get the source

In the meantime, you'll need to get the sourcecode via GIT.

git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/qemu.git

If things change, I have kept a "known good" copy of Qemu right here, that can run Solaris 2.4 .

Configure & Build

With that out of the way, you can now build the source. Since we are only concerned with the SPARC stuff, you can simply run configure like this:

configure --target-list=sparc-softmmu

And then run make. This should produce the qemu-system-sparc-softmmu executable. At this point I'm assuming you are on a system that is capable of compiling Qemu. Otherwise, there is another tutorial available on how to build Qemu for Windows users.

Starting Qemu

I'm using Windows to do this, but it won't matter as the syntax is basically the same.

qemu-system-sparc -L . -M SS-5 -m 32 -bios ss5.bin -nographic -serial mon:telnet:127.0.0.1:23,server,nowait -hda solaris.disk -startdate "2009-12-13" -net nic -net user -redir tcp:52323::23 -cdrom solaris_2.4_sparc.iso

Then simply telnet to localhost, and you can watch the OpenBoot Firmware doing it's thing.