Re: [PATCH 0/3] sparc32: allow a kernel loaded away from the start of RAM

[Magnus Lindholm]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2026 at 1:25 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> Awesome, thanks a lot for working on this!
>
> Do you know whether GRUB would work on these machines as well or is there
> anything that blocks the use on 32-bit machines. I'm currently not sure
> whether there was any show-stopper.
>

Thanks!

I have plenty of sparc32 hardware sitting around, and this lets me run current
kernels on it again.

GRUB is not an option as far as I can tell: there is no 32-bit SPARC target in
it at all. configure.ac maps target_cpu sparc to sparc64, and the only SPARC
platform is sparc64-ieee1275, so sun4c/sun4m machines have never been covered.
Happy to be corrected if anyone has got it running.

SILO still works, but it needs the loader side fixed too. A current kernel
does not fit in the 2.5MB window it loads into. I have a patch series for that
here:

https://github.com/linmag7/silo/tree/big_load-pr

Magnus