(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Last month I featured Windows NT 4.0 PowerPC and OS/2 PowerPC Edition on QEMU’s IBM 40P. The same machine has one more rare guest: Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC! Back in 2020 PA8600 wrote a great post about PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000. That was on a real 40P, with screen captures from a VGA2USB card, because “emulators cannot run anything but AIX”. Not anymore!
Most of the heavy lifting was done by Ørjan Malde: the Weitek P9100 video card, the PReP little-endian mode, SCSI fixes, and a timer fix that made the Solaris keyboard work. On top of that I fixed a few more things in LEMU, my QEMU fork:
- OpenWindows at 1280×1024! It used to hang at the splash screen, and moving windows left garbage text behind.
- Networking! Bigger packets to the guest were lost, so NFS hung. Now NFS mounts just work.
- CPU idle detection! An idle VM uses about 3% of one host core.
Behold! Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC in 1280×1024 on an emulated IBM RS/6000 7020-40P with a PowerPC 604 and a Weitek P9100 video card:
Log in as root and you get OpenWindows 3.5.1:
Specs: IBM 7020-40P (PReP), PowerPC 604, 128MB RAM, Weitek P9100 1280x1024 256 colors, NCR 53C810 SCSI, AMD PCnet
Let’s look at some cool apps!
NCSA Mosaic 2.7b5! There is no HTTPS of course, but plain http:// sites like theoldnet.com and 68k.news work great. You can always use WRP or VNC Brave for modern websites.
SimCity! No Unix workstation is complete without it. This is Micropolis Legacy with the original DUX SimCity 2.17 data files:
The VM also comes with TenoxVNC, a VNC viewer, and SNG, a system and network grapher.
There is more under the hood: Sun WorkShop Compilers 4.2 (cc and CC), and the GNU tools that I built right in the guest: bash 3.2.57, make 3.81, grep 2.5.4, gzip 1.3.12 and tar 1.15.1, then binutils 2.16.1 and GCC 2.95.3 for C and C++. binutils and GCC needed a few fixes for this platform; the README has the details. There is also Wabi 2.1, an evaluation copy from 1995 that has long expired, but see the update below!
All of it is also on osarchive, with the sources and patches: the GNU tools and GCC, and NCSA Mosaic next to NCSA’s own 2.7b5 builds.
As usual I have prepared a ready to run, portable image with QEMU binaries for macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux and Windows. Just unpack and run run.sh (or run.cmd on Windows), and log in as root without a password. Mosaic, SimCity and the other apps are in the Programs menu: right-click the desktop.
Download: https://files.42718.net/mirror/tenox/os/sunos/Virtual/qemu/powerpc/sol251powerpc-qemu.tar.lz
Source (LEMU, my QEMU fork): https://github.com/tenox7/lemu
Have Fun with Virtualization!
PS You may also be interested in AIX 4.1.5 on QEMU, on the same 40P.
Updates:
Wabi works with the clock in 1995: ./run.sh -rtc base=2095-12-15
