SunOS 4.0.3c on a SPARCstation IPC
One of the main goals I had when I bought my SPARCstation IPC was to install SunOS 4.0.3c, the earliest supported OS on this system. The build date is 25 May 1989, which makes it the only 1980s UNIX any of my machines can run. Unfortunately, my IPC has slightly newer hardware than was available when 4.0.3c was released (it was originally targeted at the SPARCstation 1), and the newer SCSI controller causes errors with the version of the esp (Emulex SCSI) driver included.
This post details how I managed to install 4.0.3c onto my IPC starting with unpatched media.
According to Sun Patch ID #100204-01, there is a very simple mod to the SCSI driver that allows this older OS to work on the IPC (aka Sun 4/40). The problem is that the boot disk (MUNIX) uses this driver to to copy the miniroot to the disk, which in turn also contains its own unpatched kernel image, when then installs the distribution which contains an unpatched kernel, so some care has to be taken to patch kernels along the way. As noted in the patchnote, at least a patched tape 1 (which contains MUNIX and miniroot) was available from Sun, but I haven’t been able to track down an image or a physical tape of it.
The starting point for the install is the SunOS 4.0.3c 23-floppy distribution (readily available online). There are four boot/install floppies and 19 SunOS floppies in this set. The first floppy contains a 4.2BSD (aka FFS) filesystem containing the bootloader (boot.sun4c) and the MUNIX kernel (vmunix), along with a copyright notice. This disk also has the bootblock (blocks 1-15) populated so the boot PROM can load/run the bootloader. The second disk has the MUNIXFS filesystem on it that is copied into a special ramdisk device by the rd driver in the bootloader.
MUNIX exists only to allow one to run format to label disks and then to copy the installer miniroot image to the swap partition on the disk. The third and fourth floppies contain the miniroot filesystem, compressed (.Z) and split over two disks. The rest of the floppies contain the install distribution sets stored as compressed tar archives stored raw on the disks (no filesystem).
Standard 1.44MB floppy disks have 80 cylinders, 2 heads, and 18 tracks per block. The last cylinder (182512 bytes = 18kb) of each floppy contains a copyright notice, a table of contents and a volume indicator. The TOC is in a binary format called XDRTOC that details the volume number and distribution file names, offsets, lengths and formats.
The following will read the TOC off any of the SunOS floppy images (as run on a SunOS 4.1.4 machine):
phoenix% dd if=sunos_disk_1.img bs=512 skip=2848 count=31 | /usr/etc/install/xdrtoc
SunOS 4.0.3c 702-1080-10 Rev. A of Fri May 26 14:02:47 PDT 1989 from Sun Release Engineering
ARCH sun4c
VOLUME -1
Vol File Name Size Type
0 -1 XDRTOC 4096 toc
1 0 root 50996 tarZ
1 51200 usr 8673675 tarZ
6 1444352 Kvm 1203581 tarZ
7 1191936 Install 580357 tarZ
8 316416 Sys 1562532 tarZ
9 422912 Networking 430105 tarZ
9 853504 Debugging 1163963 tarZ
10 561664 SunView_Users 660647 tarZ
10 1222656 SunView_Programmers 739709 tarZ
11 506368 SunView_Demo 224229 tarZ
11 730624 Text 361971 tarZ
11 1092608 User_Diag 691869 tarZ
12 328704 SunCore 798787 tarZ
12 1127936 uucp 91129 tarZ
12 1219072 System_V 1962535 tarZ
14 269824 Manual 2229955 tarZ
15 1043968 Demo 851617 tarZ
16 439808 Games 1605084 tarZ
17 588800 Versatec 2392875 tarZ
19 69632 Security 97371 tarZ
In the table it outputs, “Vol” is the floppy number, “File” is the byte offset of the start of the file on the disk, and “Size” is the total length of the file. The file start offsets are all aligned to 512-byte boundaries on the disks. Obviously a number of the files span disk boundaries; in this case each disk is read until the end, continuing at the beginning of the next disk until the entire length is read. In the above TOC we can see that ‘usr’ starts on disk 1 at byte 51200 and the next file doesn’t begin until byte 1444352 on disk 6. In this context, the “end” of the disk is the end of the 79th track (2844 512-byte blocks) - the 80th is always the copyright/toc/volheader, so care must be taken to skip the last track when trying to manually extract the tars from floppy images.
In order to apply the patch while installing the system from unpatched media, a disk with a working install of SunOS (e.g. 4.1.4) is necessary. In my case, the SunOS 4.1.4 disk is at SCSI ID# 3 and the target SunOS 4.0.3 disk is at SCSI ID# 2. The target disk must already be labeled (with format) prior to beginning this process. Make sure the a and b partitions (root and swap) are sized properly before continuing; they can’t be resized during the install process.
Because the MUNIX kernel on disk #1 is unpatched and won’t be able to properly copy the miniroot to disk, we need to bypass this by extracting the miniroot image with dd. The miniroot disks start with 4 blocks containing a copyright notice, another block which has a label with the volume letter and length (in bytes, in ASCII). We can use dd to read the lengths and use that to recreate our miniroot image:
phoenix% dd if=install_disk_c.img bs=512 skip=4 count=1
C 1472000
phoenix% dd if=install_disk_d.img bs=512 skip=4 count=1
D 1248982
phoenix% dd if=install_disk_C.img bs=1 skip=2560 count=1472000 > miniroot.img.Z
phoenix% dd if=install_disk_D.img bs=1 skip=2560 count=1248982 >> miniroot.img.Z
phoenix% uncompress miniroot.img.Z
phoenix% ls -l miniroot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 taco 6152192 Aug 26 15:12 miniroot.img
Once the raw miniroot image has been obtained, write it to the swap partition on the target disk:
# dd if=miniroot.img of=/dev/rsd2b
Once the miniroot is copied, we can mount it as a filesystem and apply the patch:
# mkdir /miniroot
# mount /dev/sd2b /miniroot
# adb -w /miniroot/vmunix
esp_phasemanage+7c?W 1000000
^D
# umount /miniroot
# rmdir /miniroot
With the patch applied, reboot into the 4.0.3 miniroot:
# sync && fasthalt
ok boot sd(0,2,1) -sw
The miniroot should boot successfully, and running suninstall at the prompt will begin the install process. Pick [fd0] as the install source and be prepared when it prompts for the 19 floppy disks. When the install completes, however, you have a filesystem with an unpatched kernel on it. It will be necessary to patch the kernel before booting into the new system. Press STOP-A and get back to the PROM prompt and boot back into the 4.1.4 disk:
ok boot sd(0,0,0)
Then login and mount the 4.0.3 root filesystem, then mount the usr partition inside it to apply the patch:
# mkdir /a
# mount /dev/sd2a /a
# mount /dev/sd2g /a/usr
# adb -w /a/vmunix
esp_phasemanage+7c?W 1000000
^D
# adb -w /a/usr/sys/sun4c/OBJ/esp.o
esp_phasemanage+7c?W 1000000
^D
# umount /a/usr
# umount /a
# rmdir /a
This patches the GENERIC kernel that is installed by default plus the esp.o driver file in case you want to rebuild a custom kernel later. This completes the patching process, so you can shut down SunOS 4.1.4 and reboot into the 4.0.3c disk:
# sync && fasthalt
ok boot sd(0,2,0)
After all this, you should be met with a login prompt and a working SunOS 4.0.3c system. During boot the kernel complains about an unrecognized system ID in the PROM but this doesn’t appear to affect functionality. This OS is primitive by modern standards but it still has the ability to connect to a modern ethernet network and communicate via TCP/IP, mount remote filesystems via NFS, etc. DNS is another matter and will require some investigation. SunOS 4.0.3c has a proprietary windowing system included called SunView; there’s no OpenWindows or X11 here (it was sold separately and I haven’t been able to locate the tape for it).
That said, it’s still very much a BSD UNIX, includes a compiler and many older versions of familiar software will compile without a lot of hassle.
As a follow on to this, I’d like to attempt to build new install floppy images and possibly tape images to ease installation in the future. The floppy install should be easy, it’s just a matter of creating a new boot disk #A, new miniroot disks (C and D) and patching the Sys tarfile, then creating a new xdrtoc to place on all of the floppies. The tape may be a more complicated matter as I think the MUNIX and MUNIX root may be different on the tape than on the floppies. Also, it should be possible to fit the entire distribution on one QIC-150 tape since the OS originally came on two QIC-24 tapes, but a new xdrtoc needs to be created to indicate that to the installer.