[9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[ron minnich]

So, I have Xvnc working on tiny horrible xen. I do not have firefox there yet.

I am hoping somebody is willing to try this ... any takers?

thanks

ron

Re: [9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[John Floren]

On 2/2/07, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I have Xvnc working on tiny horrible xen. I do not have firefox there yet.
>
> I am hoping somebody is willing to try this ... any takers?
>
> thanks
>
> ron
>

Can I get a summary of what tiny horrible xen does at this point, and
what I'd need to do to test it?
Might be interested.

John
-- 
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Re: [9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[ron minnich]

On 2/2/07, John Floren <slawmaster@gmail.com> wrote:

> Can I get a summary of what tiny horrible xen does at this point, and
> what I'd need to do to test it?
> Might be interested.

Tiny Horrible Xen -- hey! THX -- that was an accident!

Sorry.

Tiny Horrible Xen -- THX -- is a minimal -- BTW, only in the linux
world can you call this minimal:
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda4             12405032    440620  11334264   4% /xentest

Sorry.

Tiny Horrible Xen -- THX -- is a thing Aki and I cooked up, using
Richard Miller's port of Plan 9 to Xen 3. It is a minimal disk image
with a minimal linux and minimal X11. It boots in a few seconds,
direct to a /bin/bash prompt, since we don't run any linux shi --er,
scripts. It has all the modules we can find compiled for it. It mounts
ramfs over the writeable places -- /var/tmp, /tmp, etc. -- so the disk
footprint will not grow. It does not yet run root read-only.

Anyway, it has all the modules. It boots to a bash prompt, running one
bash on each of 6 VTs. The goal is to use Linux as a huge driver layer
for Plan 9, and have Linux do nothing else. We provide a native
drawterm that runs in /dev/fb (thanks aki!). VNC works. we have the
plan9ports rio on the linux side in /usr/bin. Xvnc works. So you can
run an X desktop in a vnc window that looks like X. In all ways,
linux, running as domain 0, is intended to be subordinate to Plan 9.

You can't run native X11, since we don't provide those servers, This
is intentional.

The Plan 9 boots as a terminal and gets root from Somewhere On The
Net. I use 9grid.net. I need to learn how to use CFS.

Users wanted.

ron

Re: [9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[Richard Miller]

> Richard Miller's port of Plan 9 to Xen 3

I don't deserve all the credit.  Ron and Tim built the foundation;
I just finished it up and wrote some drivers.

[9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[ron minnich]

Well, it *was* tiny. It was 67 MB. Then I added FireFox
[root@q xentest]# du -s *
4696    bin
8168    boot
1128    bzImage
220     dev
8400    drawterm
720     etc
0       halt
4       init.deb
61224   lib
16      lost+found
4       mnt
4       proc
4       README
4928    sbin
84      scripts
4       sys
8       tmp
119856  usr
44      var

sigh. Also, the default is to boot as as term. I have been trying to
get a small fossil root image on there, but can't get it to fit in
under a CD size (660MB). I need to have a small image that can serve
as a cpu/auth server (since you have to drawterm in). Any ideas?

thanks

ron

Re: [9fans] tiny horrible xen status

[Richard Miller]

> I need to have a small image that can serve
> as a cpu/auth server (since you have to drawterm in). Any ideas?

It doesn't take many files just to run as an authomous cpu/auth
server - my kfs for the ipEngine is less than 4MB (before compression).
The question is what you want to do once you've drawtermed in.

If you want something approaching a complete distribution, you can look
for large and little-used bits to prune away; or try a compressed
partition (e.g. paqfs).