Sparc32 keyboard

SUN Type 4, 5 and 5c keyboards have dip switches to choose the language layout of the keyboard. Solaris makes an ioctl to query the value of the dipswitches and uses that value to select keyboard layout. Also the SUN bios like the one in the file ss5.bin uses this value to support at least some keyboard layouts. However, the OpenBIOS provided with qemu is hardcoded to always use an US keyboard layout.

With the escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout driver property it is possible to select keyboard layout. Example:

-global escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout=de

Depending on type of keyboard, the keyboard can have 6 or 5 dip-switches to select keyboard layout, giving up to 64 different layouts. Not all combinations are supported by Solaris and even less by Sun OpenBoot BIOS.

The dip switch settings can be given as hexadecimal number, decimal number or in some cases as a language string. Examples:

-global escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout=0x2b

-global escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout=43

-global escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout=sv

The above 3 examples all select a swedish keyboard layout. Table 3-15 at https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-6642/new-43/index.html explains which keytable file is used for different dip switch settings. The information in that table can be summarized in this table:

Language selection values for escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout

Hexadecimal value	Decimal value	Language code
0x21	33	en-us
0x23	35	fr
0x24	36	da
0x25	37	de
0x26	38	it
0x27	39	nl
0x28	40	no
0x29	41	pt
0x2a	42	es
0x2b	43	sv
0x2c	44	fr-ch
0x2d	45	de-ch
0x2e	46	en-gb
0x2f	47	ko
0x30	48	tw
0x31	49	ja
0x32	50	fr-ca
0x33	51	hu
0x34	52	pl
0x35	53	cz
0x36	54	ru
0x37	55	lv
0x38	56	tr
0x39	57	gr
0x3a	58	ar
0x3b	59	lt
0x3c	60	nl-be
0x3c	60	be

Not all dip switch values have a corresponding language code and both “be” and “nl-be” correspond to the same dip switch value. By default, if no value is given to escc.chnA-sunkbd-layout 0x21 (en-us) will be used.