it has the affinity tags, but hangs… I’ll have to launch from a real Linux I guess….

Im not surprised about colour issues at all though, but more so surprised it works at all.

Interesting. Does taskset work in the Linux subsystem under Windows 10? Setting the CPU affinity seems to be key for me. If I don’t do that, then it hangs all the time on disk I/O, basically making it useless. You can set CPU affinity on a running task in Windows 10. If you’re using Windows 10 it would be interesting to see if that works on the windows version. The good news is it also seems to work perfectly fine with OpenBIOS 1.1, although I haven’t tried the install process under OB.

Quake works by the way and seems quite playable. It complains that Quake.app is invalid but if I run it from the command line (ie cd into the Quake.app dir) and run the binary it, works. The colours look inverted though. Not sure if that’s a side effect of the 8bit screen mode or a colourmap / endian issue.

I tried it,. Granted I’m using the Linux subsystem on Windows 10, compiled qemu sparc just fine but I get hangs when it’s copying files… I think you have the only working copy

The network script basically looks like this

ifconfig tap-nextstep33-sparc 0.0.0.0 promisc up
brctl addif bridge0 tap-nextstep33-sparc

I already have bridge0 bridging several physical ethernet interfaces so I didn’t need to do anything special for that

sure, defiantly interested!

Cool, I’ll check out that. I’ll paste the full config when I get home if interested. But basically I set up an SS-5 with 256MB RAM, using the default TCX framebuffer. I’m using a dump of a real SS-5 PROM. I haven’t tried yet with the default firmware to see if that works.

NS 3.3 needs the framebuffer to be in 8bit mode (default) as it kernel panics in 24bit mode. I also suspect NS may need devices on specific unit IDs so for simplicity I created a disk image and attached it as unit 3 and the CDROM iso was attached as unit 6 and booted with ‘boot cdrom’ from the OBP.

There does seem to be race condition of some-sort when doing disk I/O which hangs NS but forcing single CPU affinity seems to prevent this. I’m using Linux so I ran qemu-system-sparc prefixed with taskset –cpu-list 1. There might be a better way of doing it via the qemu accelerator.

After the initial miniroot install, you can boot from the disk with ‘boot disk3’ from the OBP. It appears to hang on boot up, but a CTRL-C kicks it into gear. It seems to be doing DHCP here – it may time out if left long enough. My DHCP server could see the requests and was sending ACKs but for some reason NS still keeps sending requests.

After the initial config, /etc/fstab doesn’t seem to get set up correctly (dunno why yet) so it drops into single user mode but remounting / as rw and fixing /etc/fstab makes the system boot up correctly. Assigning a static IP works and the guest is pingable and it actually seems quite stable.

Oh and this was Qemu 2.9.1

The binary was quad fat, if I recall…

Any details on running NeXT SPARC?

The new 'seabios' just hangs in the -M isa, and worse you can't use the old bios images….

I haven't bothered as support for things like NeXTSTEP, Xenix & Netware just isn't a priority to the qemu people.. 😐

What BIOS is the new one? I thought qemu still comes packaged with few ones for x86 arch. Which bios didn't suck?