[rescue] Converting a SunOS 4.1.4 Disk from sun4c to sun4m

[Todd Vernon]

It’s amazing how fast 4.1.4 loads on SPARCstation 5 compared to Solaris 2.6.

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Todd Vernon
Entrepreneur | Investor
Email: todd at toddvernon.com
LinkedIn: toddvernon
On Jun 28, 2026 at 1:51 PM -0600, Dave McGuire via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>, wrote:
> On 6/28/26 14:31, Todd Vernon via rescue wrote:
> > Got my Sun 4.1.4 image to boot up on my SPARCstation 5 and QEMU
> > yesterday,  thought I would share the
> > article, I see 4.1.4 stuff float around here from time to time.
> >
> > https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-sun4c-to-sun4m-graft/
>
> An excellent write-up.
>
> At Digex in the 1990s, where we were maintaining a few thousand Sun
> machines, we maintained the "Digex standard load" of SunOS4. It
> contained all of our local patches and configurations, got rid of NIS
> and other bad ideas, installed local builds of a few hundred packages, etc.
>
> It was an "all karch" load. We replaced /usr/kvm with as symlink to
> /usr/kvm-sun4, /usr/kvm-sun4c, or /usr/kvm-sun4m. OS copy scripts
> created and copied the filesystems, created that symlink as appropriate,
> took care of the bootstraps and the karch-specific kernel. The
> filesystem copies were done with async writes turned on. It all worked
> very well; we could have a new system up and running in about ten minutes.
>
> The standard load machines (sparc-proto.digex.net and
> m68k-proto.digex.net, would be called "golden" nowadays) were air-gapped
> and kept in cipherlock room. We would occasionally physically connect
> them to the network to do rdist runs for installation of new software
> and md5 comparisons of files. (that was one of our local modifications
> to rdist, along with Kerberos integration)
>
> We did the same thing with 68K-based machines, with /usr/kvm-sun3 and
> /usr/kvm-sun3x.
>
> -Dave
>
> --
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA
>
>
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