I’m writing this more as a reminder to myself than for any other reason – changes have been committed to the NetBSD sparc64 bootloader requiring a bootloader upgrade in order to boot new kernels. To quote from Martin Husemann:

A few days ago Dennis commited changes in the protocol between bootloader
and kernel. I think we forgot to warn you:

YOU NEED TO INSTALL A NEW /ofwboot NOW!

The new version will deal with old kernels just fine, but new kernels can
not be booted by the old ofwboot.

Of course, what are the odds I’ll remember this when I build and install a new kernel? I’m still using an old bootloader from July with a fairly freshly minted 3.99.15 on my sparc64 workstation.

[p5] mj@tesla:~$ uname -a
NetBSD tesla.pimp.org.za 3.99.15 NetBSD 3.99.15 (TESLA_3.99) #0: Mon Jan 23 23:14:09 SAST 2006 root@tesla.pimp.org.za:/usr/obj/sys/compile/TESLA_3.99 sparc64
[p5] mj@tesla:~$ ls -l /ofwboot
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 62254 Jul 19 2005 /ofwboot