March 8, 2022

Boot roms

The boot rom on a sun 3/160 is a 27C512 device which gives 64K of space.

The processor in a sun3 is a Motorola mc68020. On reset, the vector base register is set to 0x0. The first vector is the reset vector which provides two 32 bit words.

0x0 - initial interrupt stack pointer - 0fe60c00
0x4 - initial program counter         - 0fef00ee
Just how 0fef00ee ends up being the ROM is unclear. The sun3 manuals say that the board fires up in "boot mode" which can later be switched off by writing to the "System Enable Register". All I have yet seen written about boot state is that all supervisor program fetches take place from the EPROM.