Re: [9fans] 9vx and local file systems

["Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart@bellsouth.net>]

> > - boot/boot did bad things if the localroot
> > wasn't set, so when using boot/boot it's now .
>
> What bad things did it do?  The code is supposed
> to cope gracefully with localroot == nil.  I'd rather
> fix the code that couldn't cope.

Ah, that means I need to remember.  As you get older,
one of the first things to go is the ability to form
new memories.  What were we talking about?

Seriously, that was one of the ones that went by
pretty quickly.  Several had the basic behavior
of boot/boot exiting because it found something
that made it call fatal().  Then when it died,
9vx happily rolled over and played dead.  When
the window first vanished, it was a bit startling.

In this particular case, I had to just recreate it
to remind myself.  When boot/boot tries to see if
#S/sd00/fossil exists, it can't find it and decides
it can't connect that way.  The more I look at it
now, the less I understand it.  It seems to be that
I'm not finding my drives.  When I search for available
drives, I construct names like #Z/dev/sda.  So it
does go through devfs-posix, and that's the only place
localroot is really used.  But at first glance, at
least, it looks like that path name shouldn't be
hitting the uses of localroot. Anyway, that's the
symptom, and setting localroot to pretty much anything
makes it work.

While I'm thinking about it, there are couple of
other interesting things I had forgotten earlier.
Because we don't have /dev/rtc (yet), boot/boot
ends up asking for the date and time twice.

I'm beginning to think the lock-ups some of us have
seen are somewhere in devfs-posix.c.  When I'm using
it like drawterm, I've never seen it lock up.  When
I was using it with the local fossil/venti as root
today, it didn't.  In neither case was #Z bound.
It's at least suggestive.

> >  But I copped out.  I made one change
> > to boot/boot.  Now if it fails to open /net/ipifc/clone,
> > it's not fatal.
>
> I think this is a fine solution for this particular case.

I had been trying not to modify anything outside of
vx32/src/9vx.  In particular, I liked the idea that
all Plan 9 executables would work unmodified.

BLS