From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:19:28 -0400
To: 9fans@9fans.net
Message-ID: <103b012cdb5c55bca54c751bb88fb57c@brasstown.quanstro.net>
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Subject: [9fans] gar nix!
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 22a19544-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

well, after a bit of a time resembling /sys/src/cmd/aux/vga/adventure
i currently have my atom box running nix.  unfortunately, only one
core is recognized.  but i'll just have to leave one or two things till
tomorrow.

here are a list of a few things i tripped on

1.  unfortunately, ppxeload isn't ready to load a .gz.  i added a bit of
code to at least not jump unconditionally to an x86 binary, but that's
just not enough.  need to revisit this.

2.  ppxeload accepts only the old-and-wierd serial baud setting and
not the kernel-standard, e.g. "0 b115200".  i did fix this.

3.  the 8169 driver wasn't working.  i just dropped the one from 9load
on top.  inelegant, but effective.

(i did have a 82563 chip going for a while that wasn't recognized.  also
needed to drop in a new driver for this, but since then the hardware has
died.)

4.  panic on memory init.  this was caused because the only page color was
6, thus when starting in the array of page colors at 0, you won't find any.
.  i worked around this with this bit of code.

; diffy -c physalloc.c
/n/dump/2011/0915/sys/src/nix/k10/physalloc.c:236,242 - physalloc.c:236,244
  	uintmem m;

  	DBG("physalloc\n");
- 	assert(b->size > 0);
+ 	if(b->size == 0)
+ 		return 0;
+ //	assert(b->size > 0);

  	avail = b->avail;
  	blocks = b->blocks;

i need to go back and investigate if this is a problem with memory recognition
or what.

5.  needed to update 8169 and 82563 in the kernel.

6.  had an old version of 6l that expected to make 4k pages.  by the way,
(won't we pay a heavy price for forking and/or execing small programs
with 2mb pages?  this means that each fork/exec is going to be at least
6mb worth of messing around.)

it looks like my processors aren't recognized, and i'm pretty sure that the
atom supports 1gb pages, but they aren't recognized either.

- erik