Solaris 2.6
In 1992 Sun Microsystems (Wikipedia) released the first version of their System V release 4 based UNIX operating system, named Solaris 2.0 (Wikipedia). Over the next few years Solaris 2 releases replaced SunOS (Wikipedia), Sun's earlier BSD based UNIX, for new systems. By the last release of the Solaris 2.x line in 1997 (Solaris 2.6 aka. SunOS 5.6), Solaris was well established as the operating system on Sun's SPARC systems. However a reminder of the pedigree of the operating systems was left, in the use of "SunOS" as the internal name of the operating system, appearing in the output of various commands.
QEMU and SPARC
QEMU supports emulation of 32-bit SPARC and 64-bit UltraSAPRC systems suitable for running Solaris for SPARC.
Many examples can be found online, of installing Solaris on QEMU emulated SPARC systems:
- Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris
- Running Solaris 2.6 (sparc) on qemu-system-sparc in Linux x86_64 (Mint 19)
- Getting Started with Solaris 2.6
- Documentation/Platforms/SPARC
It readily apparent, from the volume of Solaris on QEMU descriptions and tutorials, that QEMU is a popular solution for running older version of SunOS and Solaris on SPARC platforms. Given the popularity of Solaris back in the 1990s and the amount of software developed for the platform, it is unsurprising that there is an interest in having a reliable way to run such systems, without having to deal with the ageing hardware.
So can we tell if a Solaris system is running on QEMU? Well there are various commands to get information about the system in Solaris (see UNIX System Information - Sun Solaris), so do any of them give hints?