[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2025, David McMackins II via rescue wrote:

> Any other ideas?

 At the risk of sounding obvious a tedious way would be disassembling the 
image you're trying to boot, telling the tool to limit the ISA to the CPU 
your machine has, and watching out for any invalid encodings appearing in 
output, which the tool should clearly mark.  You might then try patching 
any suspect locations with an encoding that will trigger a different kind 
of exception to see if that is really the culprit.  That'd require some 
knowledge of the SPARC ISA of course, of which I have none, so I can only 
share this basic idea at the high level.

 Try the `file' command on the boot image too; it may tell you something.  
Possibly more if you have unprocessed linker output available (i.e. not 
one converted to whatever odd format the machine's firmware expects), 
e.g.:

$ file gdbserver
gdbserver: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, SPARC32PLUS, V8+ Required, total store ordering, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, not stripped
$ 

(but this is modern ELF stuff, rather than a.out typical for the era which 
may not carry suitable information).

  Maciej