Apparently back around 2006 there was an effort at Sun Labs to get OpenSolaris to work on CHRP(like) PowerPC machines. And according to the documentation, the kernel could even boot to shell on a G4 Apple.
That effort was called Polaris. It was difficult to find the CDDL-licensed sources, but I've made them available for everyone else to play with at https://github.com/andreiw/polaris
I haven't tried it out or done anything with the sources yet. The Solaris kernel is a pretty amazing piece of software, and a very portable and well-designed one to boot. I am glad Sun open-sourced it before folding, as it's code like this that should be influencing OS R&D for generations to come. It would be interesting to see the Polaris code being used as a base for an AArch64 investigation...
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Do you also have its binaries? I have a Solaris 2.5.1/PPC cd, but haven't got a machine to test it on. Surprisingly Sun developers used PPC in the LE mode, so qemu-system-ppc -M prep is not ready to boot it yet, even with my firmware. Is Polaris LE as well?
ReplyDeletePolaris happened significantly after the PReP 2.5.1 port. Polaris is supposed to be bootable on NewWorlds (G4...) and runs in BE.
ReplyDeleteI haven't had the energy yet to build and try it on my 12" PB G4.
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If you build it, please let me know. If it is supposed to work on G4, it should boot under QEMU.
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