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WSH PVE

SPARC Guests

The WSH extensions add emulated SPARC and SPARC64 platforms so you can run Sun workstation operating systems such as SunOS / Solaris under Proxmox VE. SPARC emulation is experimental and sensitive to configuration — this guide collects the settings that are known to work.

Choosing an architecture

Section titled “Choosing an architecture”
ArchitectureQEMU binaryDefault machine
sparc (32-bit)qemu-system-sparcSS-5
sparc64 (64-bit)qemu-system-sparc64sun4u

Set this in the VM’s Architecture panel. Selecting a SPARC architecture filters the machine, BIOS, disk, and network options to the supported subset.

Section titled “Recommended hardware layout”
  • Machine — SS-5 for sparc, sun4u for sparc64 (see Machine).
  • BIOS / firmware — OpenBIOS is the easiest and most reliable choice. The bundled SS5, SS10, and SS20 PROM files are the only PROMs that are somewhat stable, and each expects a matching hardware layout (see BIOS).
  • Processor / memory — a single CPU and around 512 MB of RAM for sparc32; the CPU model is fixed by the machine (see Processors).
  • Disk — SCSI bus only.
  • CD-ROM — SCSI.
  • Network — lance (sparc; built into the machine and not hot-pluggable) or sunhme (sparc64). See Network device.
  • Display — cg3 (preferred) or tcx framebuffer; a serial console is also available (see Display and Serial port).
  • Audio — not currently working on SPARC.
  • USB / PCI passthrough — not supported on SPARC.

Installing SunOS / Solaris

Section titled “Installing SunOS / Solaris”
  1. Create a VM and set the Architecture to sparc (or sparc64).
  2. Confirm the machine, BIOS, disk bus, and network card match the layout above.
  3. Attach the installation media as a SCSI CD-ROM.
  4. Make sure a network device is present before installing — on SunOS/Solaris the network only works if it was present at install time.
  5. Boot the VM. Installation can take a long time and host CPU usage may sit near 100% for the emulated core; this is expected.

Known limitations

Section titled “Known limitations”
  • Audio does not work on SPARC guests.
  • sparc32 is typically limited to a single CPU and ~512 MB of RAM.
  • Only the SS5, SS10, and SS20 PROM files are reasonably stable.
  • sparc64 currently seems to only work with the OpenSPARC disk.s10hw2 image.

Further reading

Section titled “Further reading”