[9fans] THX hell

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

OK, here's a quandary.

THX is the tiny horrible xen, a little USB stick that I've got a
standalone system, AND a terminal you can boot from (e.g.) 9grid.net.
It has ballooned (firefox) to require a 2GB USB stick, but hey,
they're $15 at Fry's, who cares. You can boot it, it boots fine and
works fine on my T41.

It's nice, we don't even load X11, since we have Aki's FB drawterm.
Just load fbdev, good to go.

The goal here is to make Linux an insignificant part of the machine.
Boot Linux as dom0, but run Linux in (e.g.) 32MB, and give most of the
machine to Plan 9. Linux is a driver. Your immediate interface to Plan
9 is bash. There are no /etc/rc* scripts.

on my T60, there is no fbdev support. And you can't use vesafb. You
can't use vesafb in Linux, as the 16 bit part of linux never runs
under Xen. I would need to add vesafb support to Xen. This makes my
brain hurt.

I could add X11 to THX, and we could use drawterm-x11. This is not
really what we wanted to do, but ...

I was trying to have this ready to demo at BAP9UG, May 10, but this is
a snag! There is no easy FB support for T60, and I think this problem
will just become worse. Not being able to load vesafb is a problem.

So, choices:
1. Stick with Xen, add vesafb to Xen, done.
2. Stick with Xen, add X server to THX distro, run drawterm-x11, done.
3. Move to KVM, so we can have vesafb, use drawterm-fb, done.

any ideas here? What makes sense?

ron