Netbooting Gentoo on Sparc hardware

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I have an old Sun SPARC64 server in my possession and have been a fan of Gentoo for a long time. I want to put Gentoo on this server in my possession but the Gentoo Handbook directions on installing only mentions how to get it running from an ISO image. This server has no optical media and also while it has a bay for some kind of optical device that is empty it is unusual and I cannot find one I can buy that works with this hardware.

I am told from the TLDP SPARC HOWTO that it can boot a kernel over NFS. Here is a screenshot from the guide on doing that...
https://thumbsnap.com/9EQxYvFk - this screenshot is from page 20 of that PDF.

Basically I want to use a command like this on the serial console, as shown in the above PDF and screenshot of it...

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I am necromancing my own thread as I am back to this project.

I used this guide below, mostly, however I am netbooting from Raspberry Pi OS. That detail is mostly irrelevent.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Sparc/Netboot/en

I used images from here...

https://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/sparc/tftpboot/sparc64/

They are very old and the newest is from 2010. This means there are SSL cipher issues, SSH as well, and that it runs a Linux 2.6 kernel. I did however get it to boot, which is nice. It booted into a busybox and has a very limited version of tar, and so I can't seem to extract the stage3 and even try here.

I really need newer PXE roms for Gentoo on Sparc64.

It was still nice to get this far.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2025 3:44 pm Post subject:

kaizushi,

For the stage 3, you can cheat.

Using your everyday driver, the arch is irrelevant, make yourself a ./sparc64 dir somewhere.
Download the stage3 of your choice there.
Now untar it there. You need to do that as root so that -p works.
The stage3 is treated as data.

Copy the now untarred stage3 over the network to your SPARC hardware.

For bonus points add QEMU static-user to ./sparc64 on your random arch and chroot into your sparc stage3.
I've skipped the detail there but it works. :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I extracted the stage3 on the adjacent server and shared it via NFS. However, the boot image I am netbooting from cannot do NFS either, I suspect because it is too old.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2025 5:37 pm Post subject:

Try

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I am booted in using the outdated 2010 ftpboot image and it does not have rsync.

I tried your suggestion there and I also made check that my NFS server supports version 2. I also tried version 3 but this resulted in the same I/O error. This I/O error takes about 10 seconds to appear.

As for sneakermail, I do not have a SCSI cdrom and they are too expensive to buy.
_________________
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2025 6:33 pm Post subject:

kaizushi,

A USB stick?
Even if your SPARC is USB1. You will only do this once.

I won't suggest Kerrmit over a serial port, at least, not seriously.

Try asking in #gentoo-sparc on Libera IRC. Its quiet but all of Gentoos SPARC expertise is there.
You need to register a /nick to speak. It's a mild anti spam measure.
Someone there may know of a later image that you can PXE boot.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

pingtoo · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2025 6:41 pm Post subject:

There are some clarification you need to do.

Are you actually booted? do you have rootfs from the "image"? even over NFS is fine.

Or you are actually in initrd?

may be sharing output of command "mount" will give a clear picture.

I mean in theory if you got NFS root you should be able to mount another NFS share.

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

For some clarification I have booted the pxe image and gotten a busybox shell. I posted the output of uname -a above. I have not mounted a root partition via NFS, I was trying to mount a directory where I extracted the stage3 tarball to try to chroot into it. However, since this pxe image boots a 2.6 kernel I suspect I will have more troubles then. If there are some files to extract and use as an nfsroot, they were not mentioned in the wiki and I don't know how to find them.

I will be trying the method of using USB storage tomorrow. However, I will be chrooting into a 2025 stage3 from a 2010 PXE image. It would be good if the PXE images were updated.
_________________
I cook a delicious onion stew without any chili peppers.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2025 9:29 am Post subject:

kaizushi,

Debian has a PXE image from 2023.
Boot that, then use its shell to install Gentoo. I had to do something similar on ARM64 a few years ago.
You may need the Debian wiki page to coax it to PXE boot.
Debian no longer supports SPARC.

You will need one extra step. Debian does not provide /mnt/gentoo, so you need to create it.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I am not sure how to get a PXE image from the ISO in that link there. The Debian Wiki has some directions on making grub available on the tftp server, however they are for people who already have a working sparc64 system which I do not have. Can someone who has already done this perhaps make a tarball of the files their tftp server has, so I can just extract those?
_________________
I cook a delicious onion stew without any chili peppers.

pingtoo · Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2025 2:57 pm Post subject:

I am interesting solving boot related issue. I have some experience managing Solaris machines in the past. However I don't know all the detail of netboot for Sun machine.

If you interesting I be happy to work with you to come up solution for you case.

Gentoo Download site have current iso which I think would help (no guarantee since I have not done it before). BTW, it is not a netboot image therefor no "PXE image" per se. However it should have much modern kernel.

kaizushi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Sep 2018 Posts: 77

I was hoping I would come back to this thread to find an answer to netboot easily, Debian or Gentoo, perhaps this could involve a new PXE image or a better instructions for Debian. I cannot boot the ISO (unless there is some way to boot it via PXE) as I do not have a SCSI drive to do so, and they are out of my price range. I really need hard support here, in the form of a working environment I can boot from PXE.

I looked at the Debian Sparc64 ISO you guys are talking about and there is a kernel and initrd I could use, and perhaps the other files could be on an NFS server. I am however unsure how to tell Sun OpenBIOS that there is both these files to download or the specific kernel arguments to do so. Some examples of what that OpenBIOS command should like would be nice.
_________________
I cook a delicious onion stew without any chili peppers.

pingtoo · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2025 9:40 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2025 1:52 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on Sparc.
It may get more support here.

SPARC ISOs should boot in a QEMU assisted virtual machine. I've not done that for about 15 years.
Once there, it should be possible to prepare grub so that the Debian ISO can be PXE booted.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.